Day 7

Today was a day of dye prep, and so I thought I would share the steps I took, along with pictures when possible, to prepare to dye my fabric.

Before I get into the prep process, I wanted to share images of two quilts from the show that I thought might be particularly interesting to my audience.

This is a quilt featuring chemical and mathematical symbols, which are difficult to see in this image

This is a detail image from the previous quilt. Here you can see some of the chemical structures in the quilt

This quilt became the face of Spock from afar

And now for the dye prep process:

Step 1: Buy your fabric. The fabric that I bought is 100% cotton, or very close to all cotton, which will take the dyes up with relative ease. The fabric that I will be dyeing is white so that the only coloration it will have will be from the dyes I apply.

Step 2: Wash(and dry) your fabric. This step is important because it makes sure that your fabric shrinks if it is going to shrink. If you leave some of the fabric unwashed, and put it into the quilt, when you wash the quilt the unwashed fabric will pucker and change the appearance of the quilt.

Step 3: Iron your fabric. After your fabric comes out of the dryer, it will be wrinkly. The fabric needs to be ironed in order to be cut into the desired sizes.

Step 4(optional): Watch your cat play with the freshly ironed fabric.

Step 5: Cut your fabric. For the blocks of my quilt, I cut pieces that are approximately 18×22 inches large.

Step 5: Manipulate the fabric. This is the part of the process where you fold, stitch, or wrap your fabric up so that a design will be created when it is placed in dye. Some of the options are pictured below.

A piece of fabric being folded up into triangles

A machine stitched piece of the design

A piece of fabric stitched into a sleeve and placed around PVC pipes

A hand stitched version of the design

I also mixed the dyes and chemical water that I will be using Wednesday, following given recipes. In my next post there will be more information on the colors I am using, and the dye process itself.

• Julia M.