Making Lemonade

You know that old saying - when you have lemons, make lemonade. I was working on a quilt that had lots of yellow with some inset bands of dark blue, all hand dyed by me. Following the procedure that I have been doing lately, after quilting the piece, I sprayed it with water to soak through to the batt, then threw it into the dryer. This makes a really cool puckery effect that takes on a whole new dimension when it's painted since the paint only hits the high points. Anyhow, I was dismayed to discover that the blue dye ran. Somebody didn't rinse the dyes out well enough, probably ought to fire her. I put the entire piece into cold water with Synthrapol and ran it through another cycle. This removed most of the blue dye except for right up close to the blue fabric. Not good.

The yellow parts looked pretty good so I decided to cut the piece up. There will be a SAQA Auction piece (12" x 12"), 4 small 8"x8" pieces, 7 4"x5" pieces, and a few ACEOs, those 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inch pieces. Some of these are going to be mounted on stretcher bars just to make sure nobody thinks they're potholders or drink coasters.

A while back there was a discussion on the SAQA list about the "skinny envelope", the reply from the juried show that comes in the mail in an envelope that's only thick enough to contain the rejection letter. I've been waiting for the response from the National Fiber Directions show in Wichita and it arrived yesterday. The envelope was so skinny that there wasn't even a full size sheet of paper in it. I didn't want to open it, but you never know. The envelope contained the juror notification card, the part of the entry form that gets torn off and returned with the results on it. And hooray! one of my pieces was accepted.

Choices

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