I have spent many fun hours doing immersion dye on extra-high quality cotton, comparable to the tightly woven fabrics used in Batik work. I have washed, dried, pressed, and hoarded my results, and gifted a few special people with a piece here and there, for a birthday or special event... but I have had a terrible time using any of it myself!
I used a bit of my early pieces to make some small items, bags, but I just couldn't bring myself to slice it up into parts for a quilt, so yesterday I started cutting pieces for some Seminole style strips to put into a quilt. There are glowing shades of yellow, turquoise, green, cobalt, purple... and wonderful muted tones with streaks of magenta or crimson, and I'm just wacking it into strips of 2", 3", or 4", which should be adequate to play with the patterns in my Seminole book, and the advantage is that since I intend to machine quilt it myself, I can work up the quilt one strip at a time, and hope to manage the super-Cal-King on my home machine.
Why is it so hard to cut the fabric? Do I feel like I don't deserve to use it? I have no problem cutting the fabrics I don't really get the big charge out of, so why not use them on my projects when I'm going to spend lots of my limited time and energy, so my results will be as good as possible. Hmmm.
B*B,
Ysabeau
I'm proud of you for doing it! Maye the resistance comes because it feels like cutting up a work of art. Sort of like making a painting and then slicing it up. Perhaps if we think of them more as hand made pots of paint, and the Quilt as the canvas?
ReplyDeleteI agree with diana. I would imagine it's hard to slice up a big beautiful piece of cloth. But when you see it all come together in the quilt, I'm sure it'll be worth it :)
ReplyDelete-susie