Sorting through photographs on the computer I came across pictures of fabrics I had hand dyed a couple of years ago.  I should add that they were my first attempts at dyeing and I was pleased with the colours so am posting the images for a bit of post Christmas cheer.

Markal paintsticks can make beautiful shaded bands of colour on fabric.  I coloured fabrics by painting onto a roughly torn mask, then brushing the paint onto the fabric.  Old toothbrushes work very well!  Here are some examples of the painted fabrics:

This is the finished quilt.  It was cut and fused onto its backing fabric then machine quilted using variegated threads.

It was only after I finished it that I noticed the white line across the quilt and could have kicked myself.  So - I will be cutting it up into at least two pieces and reworking with layered images.  I hope to have the new work at my exhibition in February so watch this space for further developments!

Artisan is having a brilliant pop-up Christmas shop and my fabric covered notebooks are selling well.  If you find yourself in the Willesden/Harlesden area of London you might find just the right thing for a present and they will certainly not be on the Hight Street!  Follow this link for more details of the artists and their work:   www.artisan80.com

I used to put tea bags into the recycling bin but now they sit on a shelf to dry and are then incorporated in artwork.  Of course, the tea is first removed!  I iron the bags onto fusible web to be used on fabric and paper and once so stabilised they can be successfully stitched.

For this piece, the teabags were stitched down with lines of quilting.  I then screen printed the teasel images onto the quilt.  There was further stitching to highlight some of the outlines of the images and to give depth.

The reason I like using teabags is that the patterns made by the tea are random but there is a unity in the colours - sometimes very pale, often dark and all in a beautiful palette.

The various stages of preparing a teabag hanging: