Drool Worthy

January 4, 2016 by curvylou 7 Comments

Remember these and these and these?

I bought the threads during a week-long salvage and thrift store binge last summer. The fabrics are samples I’ve created over the past several months, just throwing things together and seeing what happens using bougainvillea, yellow dock, English ivy, eucalyptus, and various mordants, including iron shavings and rust dyeing.

The resulting fabrics were so exciting, I couldn’t help but continually fondle and arrange them. One night, thinking of Claire Wellesley-Smith’s blog Clarabella, I laid out all my sample fabrics and all the threads I bought last summer, cotton and silk both, and played with different color combinations.

The more I played and moved around the fabrics and the threads, the more magic I saw. Sometimes the thread colors were a direct color match with the fabrics.

Other times they were a hue or shade darker or lighter than the fabric.

Sometimes the thread colors were a contrast to the fabric, like in the image below. I particularly love this combination. The dark charcoal and olive fabrics contrast so nicely with the orange thread, and the olive fabric actually has a kind of orange undertone that really works for me. I can’t wait to get these three together on a project.

The process was hypnotic, and I earnestly look forward to actually making something from all of these small, naturally dyed fabric samples I’m amassing. A cloth of some kind, possibly, akin to Claire Wellesley-Smith’s work.

What I really want to do is make a quilt top out of them. The idea shoots my lust and drool levels off the charts, but I already have so many unfinished cough-mid-stream-cough projects that I hesitate to take up another.

Maybe I’ll just keep these in a bowl on the table and play with them. How’s that?