Post Christmas - and some hot weather

 It has been sunny and hot for a few days, is forecast for a few more, then some relief again. But it appears that summer is definitely here!

I thought I'd take advantage of the sunshine and do a bit of sundying. I haven't done any for ages so I decided just to try a few small pieces of fabric to see what I would get. 

Not great results! The fabric has dyed - not that I have washed it yet test the fastness. 

I just grabbed a small stash of little bits of cotton, some of them quilting cotton with designs in white on them. 

This is the back of one of the pieces seen above.

I have just remembered that I tried dyeing some white fabric years ago, with different designs on them, using the same dye (not sundye, from memory). It gave me a great selection of different colours - I think I had made a block using the log cabin design, the pieces were all white and I dyed it all together. It gave me in interesting outcome. As usual, I saw that it would work and then did no more! I tend to do that, see if something will work, or how to do it, then not doing any more. 

Anyway - I have some coloured fabric pieces. I put some of them under bushes that were throwing down beautiful shadows. Nothing was visible on the fabric - I'm not sure if that is because the shadows were above the fabric, rather than touching it or if I just used too many colours so that the sun effect isn't clear. 

I did one slightly larger piece (I think it is some calico rescued from a plum pudding from a couple years ago). I put the leaves on the fabric this time and there are some barely visible designs. 

                                                     

I have no idea what I will use them for, if anything. But I can now go into summer with some hope to achieve something creative. 

Maybe getting some inspiration.

 I went to the AQC today, haven't been for a few years. 

It was busy around all the stalls, lots of lovely things I could have bought. I was relatively restrained but did buy a few little things - no fabric though, I have quite a good stash as it is. 

But I saw a couple of quilts that spoke to me. There were many beautiful and amazing quilts but these ones may be able to get me going again. One hopes. 

These will hopefully inspire me to do (and use) some more sun dyeing and eco-dyeing. I loved them!

  This was an amazing piece with free motion machine drawing!!

I liked this one because I like using scrim. And one of the members of our free motion machine embroidery group happened to bring a whole lot along last weekend - of course I took some, not knowing what I might use it for - now I am getting some ideas. 

All in all, a good day out!