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Sunday 27 April 2014

Women's Art Society of Montreal: annual show

Dianne Robinson and Heather Dubreuil are delighted to participate once again in the annual exhibition of the Women's Art Society of Montreal. Traditionally held in Ogilvy's Tudor Hall, this year it will be staged at Galerie Fabienne Rhein, 1366 Ontario East, May 1 - 15, with an opening on May 1 from 5 - 8 p.m. Work in many media will be on display, but unfortunately just one work per artist because of space limitations.


Tuesday 15 April 2014

Success??

I have dyed 7 pieces of fabric with Heather's recipe for 'that perfect colour', using three parts turquoise to 1 part boysenberry, and using hotter than normal water.  I started with very strong dyes, then decreased the concentration by a factor of 2 for each subsequent dye bath.  As I did not have 7 buckets available I used large plastic bags, but attempted to manipulate the fabric as much as possible to get reasonably even colours.  The seventh piece was pure cotton, dyed the same concentration as the 6th, but for the rest I used a silk/bamboo satin fabric.  In Canada I had loved using a Kaufmann fabric, Radiance, which was a silk/cotton mix and which dyed a slightly different colour on each side.  I was hoping this fabric would do the same.


Here's the results!!  The fabric on the far left is the cotton, the rest are the silk/bamboo mix, going from least dye on the left to most dye on the right.  The fabrics are folded so that you can see both sides of each piece.  As you can see, I got vastly different results from the two sides of the fabric!!  The single cotton piece dyed far more evenly; whereas the silk sucked up the boysenberry dye, leaving the bamboo side much paler and generally bluer, and both sides showed a larger variation across the fabric.  I presume this was because the dye struck much faster on both the bamboo and the silk than the cotton.

I think I may have to order more of this fabric, but perhaps I had better play with these pieces first.

Wednesday 9 April 2014

Helena's ad

And congratulations to Helena for her work being selected as the advertisement for the Lakeshore Artist's Association.  This is an old and venerable art group and she is their first (and only) textile artist.




Heather featured in SAQA weekly email blast

Congratulations to Heather whose piece, Brooklyn #5, is featured on SAQA's Weekly  Email Blast to members this week as one of the 2014 fundraising auction pieces.
2014 Benefit Auction - Call for Entries

She is in very good company!!!!!

Sunday 6 April 2014

advertisement!


This is probably a little hard to see. Our guild has a show annually in the media room of the library for a month.  It's quite popular, and this year the theme is Made in the Shade featuring leaves and trees.  The City of Beaconsfield used my Fine Living quilt in it's flyer ad, and tonight on our way home we saw that it is also on the billboard version - you can just see the chairs overlooking the lake - the trees have been chopped off!






Saturday 5 April 2014

That elusive colour - again

I've been sitting here thinking about making a quilt for the Guild challenge for the next Festival of Quilts, and have come up with a design I rather like.  More 'modern' than anything I have done before - lots of white areas which will have to be quilted.  The theme for the challenge is 'In My Garden' and I have a vision of blue flowers on the white background.  In my head the blue is that wonderful blue from the hibiscus that I chose last year; and of course I need to do some dyeing to get the right fabric.  So thank you Heather for all your hard work last year trying to find the perfect dye combination!!  I've ordered a silk/bamboo fabric from Whaley's and shall attempt to dye it with Heather's recipe.  Fingers crossed!!  I would have loved to try it with snow dyeing, but not only do I know that blues do not work with cold temperatures, but we have had no snow at all this year, and are now well into spring anyway.  I'll let you know how I get on!

Linda