After an amazing Fiber Forum (EGA) retreat with Carol Soderlund at the Atlantic Center for Art (New Smyrna Beach, Florida), my love of dyeing has been revived. Hand-painting threads and fabric is now set for "game on" status. As I have an embarrassment of riches in cotton weaving thread (a beautiful textural addition to many of my own pieces), I added these to my Etsy Shop. I have loved and used them for years, but when I began dyeing them, I liked them even better-- the colored ones overdye to form color families, the natural whites dyed in deep, rich colors . . .
I have one more thing to take care of before I start dyeing in my normal obsessive manner, and that is to present a program to the Knoxville Chapter of EGA next week. Cynthia has been my indispensable guide and editor in setting up the Power Point Slide Show that is the heart of the presentation. The program discusses the eighteen months the FreeStylers spent studying Jan Beaney and Jean Littlejohn's "In Stitches" DVDs, with our samples as the centerpiece. We have been pressing against the boundaries of traditional embroidery in this year and a half, and the colorful and exciting results are quite worth sharing with other stitchers.
After the Tuesday evening presentation, the bottles of dye will come out. Carol's class, besides being immensely inspiring, touched on the way to organize and manage materials and supplies for dyeing, as well as introducing a much-streamlined process from the one I have used in the past. She has blogged about the class here. Check out her very colorful blog for pix of the class and notes about her own work and teaching schedule.
