Applique is my Passion

I've been exploring wool and dyeing along with needle felted appliques these past 8 months.   I started with white wool fabric and dyeing it with instructions in some dyeing books.  A little knowledge and a lot of experimental got me some dyed fabric that doesn't look like batik (which looks like everybody else's).  I was trying to find  the colors for a background that I could embellish with hand embroidery and felting as in these examples: I was thinking these strips would become borders for the Newest Flock of Sheep...one that has more open space to quilt.  However I found that they are too busy in design for that felted applique quilt.  The next quilt project is a reworking of the Alphabet quilt that I designed in 1996 in cotton. This is the new wool version:   All the wool fabrics, rovings and pearl cotton threads have been hand dyed by me. The Quail and the Rat are still appliques, and will get needle felted tomor...

I saw this plant, called Crocosmia, several years ago on a gardening show, Gardening by the Yard, and I had to have one.  So I bought one at the local nursery in August when it was in bloom,  I planted it and it died during the winter.  I found some corms at the grocery (Wegman's carries an interesting assortment of things in addition to foodstuff).  I bought the box of corms and planted them.  They apparently grew because now I have two plants with flower buds and I am so excited.  I have never seen a flowering plant that I was so drawn to.  It is as graceful as a dancer.  I love curved lines.  I have been drawing this plant on some of my felted blocks, without knowing that there are more groups of flowers on the same stem.  This makes the flower more complex.  Complex design is very enticing to me. Here is what I drew in thread after observing the crocosmia.  The flowers on the right are new stitches and the ones on the...

I am fascinated with dying now.  One of the drawbacks to dying is walking around with colored hands, because I keep forgetting to keep my gloves on.  I am playing around with wool fabrics, embroidery threads and wool fibers.  The most fun is the stitching with hand dyed embroidery threads.  When I first embroidered the Crazy Sheep quilt, as I ran out of a colored thread, I would pick up another color or at least a different shade, and continue on with my stitching. Now I am able to use one thread and with many color changes in my embroidery without so many starts and stops.  The dyeing process is addictive.  I can't wait to see what colors emerge.  I have been using my acid dyes (which work well on wool) for my pearl cotton embroidery threads.  There are special dyes for cotton, that probably work better than the ones for wool.  I will experiment with them later, as it requires buying more stuff.  Once I found that they didn't need to...