Beautiful colours

I spent my birthday in the most fun way: my quilt guild went to my mom's studio, 90 minutes away from our city, for a dyeing workshop. Check out Laura's blog for more details on the process and her lovely results. Despite my mother being a hand dyer and teacher for 20 years, I had never done more than a few t-shirts (and a bit of yardage in purple), mostly because she is very generous with her fabrics. So this is my first attempt at dyeing the spectrum with Procion dyes, in the fall dark range of colours.

I'm generally happy with them, although there are more oranges than I expected, and the red isn't terribly red. But there are many variables in this process, and I did manipulate and twist the fabrics to get variations in the colour. I'm happy with the range of colour on a piece of fabric.
At the end of the workshop there was still dye and fabric left, so I folded half metre cuts of unbleached muslin and then put rubber bands on the folded bundle for some resist lines. Except for the yellow, these are from the summer line of dyes. I'm happy with this yardage in primaries, and I'm going to share them with my guild (under instructions from mom, although I'm tempted to keep them.)

And then we pushed the experiment once more, and overdyed some white on white yardage in purple and red. I love how that crochet look flower pops out. (I'm supposed to share these too. Come on, it was my birthday!)
After a lovely potluck lunch on the deck as well as two birthday cakes, we packed up and headed to a local quilt store, and then some of us saw Joyce's show on the last day. It was a great day in quiltland.