Not Trusting the Weather

Yesterday was the day for our get-together - three of us are getting together on a regular basis. We have been talking about sun dyeing but I didn't trust the weather and didn't prepare for it. It was raining most of the previous day, off and on, heavily when on! Just ask me and my dog about that.

Anyway, I didn't take any things suitable for sun dyeing. But one of our group did; it was her first time, so we were happy to give lots of helpful advice when it turned out to be sunny after all.

Since I wasn't going to do the dyeing and didn't have anything specific to do, I decided to do the homework from my Design for Stitch course - the only thing I got done was to come up with an outline drawing of a dragonfly.
Our task was to fold a piece of paper in half and draw half an insect shape, then cut it out so we would have a symmetrical shape.
Then we are to fill in a pattern, cut out parts of it and, hopefully, have an interesting design. Our current topic is tone, so I presume I should try filling in parts of the drawing with different tones.

I looked online at beetle shapes and patterns - lots of lovely images. Then I tried dragonfly images and came across a site that gives instructions on drawing a dragonfly. I folded my paper and drew half the image, then unfolded it and cut it out.

The person doing the sun dyeing asked, in an interested tone of voice, what I intended doing with that stencil. How could I say no? So she used it in one of her sun dyeing pieces. It worked rather well.

                                          

The paper stencil absorbed some of the dye. The image below shows the fabric after the removal of the stencil. The sunshine was not consistent but obviously there was enought to do the job.

I copied my stencil so that I now have a cutout. I then found an image that had used an outline and filled in the pattern with Zen doodling.

I thought about how I might fill in the pattern on my cutout and realised that making it symmetrical may be a challenge. That's when I ran out of time and had to leave. However, I did have a chance to try some doodling last night. It reminds me that I haven't done much lately and I need to take it up again. It was very restful.

                                         
Ideas are slowly percolating - maybe a free motion piece, maybe a quilted piece. We are expected to come up with textile samples between (fortnightly) classes, so I hope to be able to play around with the idea in the next few days.