I have foolishly volunteered to make the school auction quilt this year. Two years ago, I spent a lot of time working on this quilt that was embroidered by all 400 of the kids. It took me about 6 weeks at the school sewing with each kid. Though it was lovely to introduce the kids the kids to sewing, I have learned a few lessons. This time around, we are having each kid dye a piece of fabric which will then be incorporated into the quilt. A much faster and easier process. I’ll post more later about the process of dyeing each piece individually if anyone is interested.
But above you can see some experiments that my kids and I did with patterned fabric. Ultimately we’re using only those with subtle or small-scale pattern and skipping the fabrics that grayed out too much in the dyeing process. I am using a kaleidoscope quilt design, so I think the quilt will be busy enough without too much additional pattern. Here’s the stack of fabric we have so far, and I think we’re close to halfway through the almost 400 kids who will be dyeing fabric. You can see I am sticking with shades of green, yellow, and blue and striving for lots of color variation. I’ll keep you posted on the process.
Last year I did a quilt for our school auction with my son’s 4th grade class. Almost every Wednesday morning of the school year was spent with the kids creating their class quilt (it brought the school $7800.00 at the auction). The kids sewed the squares that i cut, they appliqued, and they quilted the entire double bed sized quilr. It was a ton of work but was worth it in the end. So, I applaud what you are doing and the time you are giving. Good luck and have fun.
Ambitious and admirable! I can’t wait to see what this quilt looks like!
Awesome project with the kids. I’d be interested in your dying process.
I, too, would love to hear more about the dyeing process. I’ve got a scrap bag of lovely hand dyed fabrics, but I need a couple more colors for the project I’ve got in mind.
foolishly she says – come on you love it! I look forward to reading about your adventures on this project!