5 Little Monkeys

My PTA group recently had their Oct meeting...this time a field trip to downtown Weaverville in North Carolina.....The main objective besides the usual talking and eating ...was to visit a new quilt shop! Hooray!

5 Little Monkeys is a wonderful new quilt shop; when first walking in....it was hard to believe it had just opened - soooo much fabric and quilting supplies to select from.

Fabric, fabric everywhere and like Angie said...she wanted to stock all kinds of fabric for every kind of quilter...

and that she did with tremendous success.

Antique cupboards hold fabric and other quilting supplies

and add to the charm of her store.

Angie also has a long arm quilter and provides a quilting service to the quilt community. I was impressed with the beautiful quilting on this piece.

There is a yummy section on batiks and lots more to see....please stop by and say hi...It's a lovely shop...and Are you wondering where the name came from ? Angie is the mother of 5 and yes indeed..they were little monkeys way back when. It has been a dream of Angies to open a quilt store..so glad for all of us, it happened!

and our very happy group...

who ended up at the cafe/bakery right down the block...such a great day!

Gelli-Printing with the Fiber Junkies

This month at Fiber Junkies, we were working on a great indoor activity -  Gelli printing....great fun as always. We had lots to try; Denny brought several different kinds of printing surfaces along with many masks/resists. We all had lots of different paints along with some silk screens I brought. They often work nicely on top of a dried gelli print.

But first...a quick show and tell....

 I love this new piece by Kate - lots of beautiful stitching and great autumn colors.

 Another whole cloth piece which has been hand marbled by Kate. It has a great watery feel with lots of movement.

 Another huge and beautiful quilt made with orphan blocks. Denny did a great job with color... as always....

and a detail....

 Denny showed us samples of fabrics dyed with Indigo mx and then compared them to fabrics dyed with preduced Indigo...some luscious prints. Denny is the experimenter in our group, always trying new things and always so sharing!

 This is a beautiful piece made by Gen with some great thread work on top.

 This is one of the "plates" Denny brought to try - a piece of blue foam board with plastic cling wrap on top to protect the surface from absorbing paint. It had an interesting feel to it when printing...not quite as "springy" as a gelli plate but it still worked well.

 Denny also made her own gelli plate which has a very different feel than the purchased ones.

 Here is another purchased plate that Denny brought - 12" x 12" -  a nice size.

 Mary was doing some printing on felt...

 using a fork...how clever!

 Denny brought her tree stencil which is fun to use. I laid it down to see how it would look...

The front....

 and the back which I was surprised to see it bleed through to the back for a more subtle but nice print.

 I also tried printing on a harder surface - had a slight texture to it which made it interesting on the surface....think you might be able to see it.

 Kate created this print and then did some silk screening on top.

 I really liked this piece of fabric, but it needed more. I coated the gelli plate with blue paint and laid down some circle shaped masks

 and also used the circles and green paint on this piece of fabric.

 This piece I used a silk screen on top...

 This piece also used circles (made out of file folders) to mask off areas.

 This piece was a combination of both gelli printing and a silk screen.

 This looks like a bit of a mish-mosh but the right side has some potential.

But there are some pieces that should have been left alone - like this one...I made it worse, so this might be hopeless although there are some in this group who would say...Never give up! You know who you are...

A wonderful, fun and productive day...this is just part of Denny's pile of new treasures...

Folly - The Results

We had some great results...turned some bad pieces into good pieces and discovered new things. We love to experiment and think the most fun part is when you discover something wonderful has happened after all the trial and error...that's not to say, it will happen again...but that's okay.

Mary had the best results working with wool and plant material...this is a piece of wool folded in half with plants in middle...One half, the one tightest to the plants has a very strong print, the other side does not...Both are great!

So remember the plexiglass squares sandwich with fabric in the middle...on the right - the results!

Here are the old fashioned hair curlers we used to sleep on...how did we ever do that? They have been clamped sporatically on the fabric and then scrunched using rubberbands.

The results are pretty cool I think...lots of Indigo color and visual texture.

The piece on the left was folded; a round disc on top and bottom served as a resist. The one on the right started with white fabric that had been lightly rusted. The rust is reading yellow in the picture but it is rust. Fabric was wrapped around short corks and marbles....kinda looks like flowers.

This piece was a very coarse piece of burlap which was scrunched...took the Indigo well.

The piece on the left was a pale tone on tone rubbed vigorously with live Indigo plant - a very pale color resulted. It was then folded and dipped in Indigo. The piece on the right was heavily rusted and dipped in Indigo...think that's my favorite one. The one below on right was wrapped on the pole on the left.

Eco printing on a piece of China silk above...maple leaves (R) and Eucalyptus on left

Eco printing on pages from an old booklet....

Water color paper and Eucalyptus leaves... Maple and Eucalyptus on Khadi paper on bottom

I have a collection of old magazines...this was a page which I hoped would work. It's very thin and thought it might fall apart in the "boiling" process...

but it held up and looks pretty cool...(on left) - on right is Sumac on paper, edges dipped in Indigo.

And a rusted t-shirt I had...needed some Indigo to jazz it up...I really liked the results. I was in Macys the other day and a lady came up to me...said she liked it and asked where I got it....(happy dance)..well at least she didn't think I was a hippy from the 60s.....

And last but not least...the sunset...what would our retreats be without this beautiful ending to a perfect day...

along with great girlfriends...!