Design Opportunity

From Irene Watson

I recently had time to play with the techniques in C June Barne’s book, Stitching to Dye in Quilt Art. I really like the pieces she’s done using her foundation technique so I ran out on a shopping spree and bought every white and off-white cotton and cotton blend in the area.

Armed with my new stash, I loaded a plain piece of muslin onto my long-arm. I stitched down strips and quilted as I went. I really liked the results of the undyed piece and struggled with the decision to dye or not dye for weeks.


Last week I threw caution to the wind and decided to dump that bugger in a bucket of dye. I made two mistakes. The first was dyeing on a day when I was fighting a virus. I sneezed while holding the dye container over the bucket and spilled a good amount of dye into my solution. The second was ignoring the first mistake. My little golden yellow piece is now lovely neon orange. The color in the picture is not true. It’s a really eye burning orange.

I haven’t decided whether to view this as a challenge and work with it as is, to overdye it with bronze or a light red to try to tone it down, or to bleach the heck out of it to remove some of the color. I’m leaning towards bleaching it. If it ends up with holes, it’ll just be another design opportunity. Right?