Shirley Goodwin - Dyeing2Design

Sunday, November 15, 2009

# 2

This is for the second daughter, Melody, who is almost 5.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

In the Pink

Firstly, thank you to those blogfriends who sent me their kind wishes about Roxy. I appreciate your thoughts and hugs.

Secondly, I'm working on some children's quilts at the moment. These are for my friend Jill's children (Jill, stop reading now!). The first one is for Ivy, who is almost 7 and a keen ballerina.

Click on the photo for a larger view. I found a cute ballet-themed fabric for the main fabric.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Remembrance Day

My beautiful daughter Roxy who died 26 years ago today.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

November and The Red Quilt

Unbelieveable! It's November already! Here's a collage of some more late spring flowers. I love paeony flowers - especially the deep crimson ones- but this salmon-coloured one is gorgeous too.

To my surprise, I've found myself reverting to my first love in quilts - big bold patterns and lush colours. I've spent quite a bit of time dabbling in different art quilting techniques and making all sorts of fabric , but have never been able to settle on a "style".

Perhaps I've recognised that my talent doesn't lie in inventing art quilts but in the use of colour. This is what I really enjoy - mixing my hand dyes with lovely commercial designs. Surprisingly, I also love quite simple quilt patterns too - above is the middle of a medallion quilt (Knot Garden Quilt from Kaffe Fassett's book "Country Garden Quilts") which I've simply called "The Red Quilt". Okay, there's a yellow border in there, but I felt it needed a bit of contrast. Naturally, my quilt looks nothing like the original.

Sometimes it's nice to let someone else do all the hard work designing a pattern. More on The Red Quilt as I work through all the borders.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

The Long Weekend

It's Labour Weekend here in New Zealand, the first public holiday after winter, so it's much anticipated. Traditionally, there is bad weather for Labour Weekend, but that's not coming till tomorrow.

Today I felt like doing some Blended dyeing, and it's saturated reds (with a bit of yellow thrown in) that I'm doing today. Fortunately, there was only 5 metres on the roll....otherwise I'd have kept going.

I did the dyeing to take a break from taming the wilderness - some parts of my garden are NOT cultivated. I started out the back, where I plant the vegetables and fruiting plants. The clumps of grass were over knee-high so it's quite hard work when you're unfit. Like me.

These are 2 bags of early potatoes (Jersey Benne, if you're interested), so that I can have new potatoes for Christmas.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

It's cherry blossom time!

This one is an upright tree...

..while the new one in the middle of the lawn is a weeping cherry. There are a number of beautiful weeping cherries that I see in Rangiora, and I decided I had to have one. I will plant other things underneath this one to make a feature garden.

I am still in love with these bags. This one is made from pastel hand-dyed fabric screenprinted with my tree design. I really like the colours .

The reverse of this is in strips - same fabric, different colourways. This will be the inside although the bags are fully reversible.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

After returning from the quilting retreat, I was in a bag mood. I made this bag, which goes together in a really strange way...

..but produces a lovely reversible bag. Yes, these are the same bag. I made the little pockets from the triangles I cut off at the top when sewing the sides together - I told you it was strange.