If you have been following me on my old blog, Twitter, Facebook Ravelry etc etc you will know we have moved home several times in the last 2 years, some of them traumatic, none of them permenant until (fingers crossed) now.
We've just come back to Exmoor from a christmas visit to our family in Suffolk and have brought a van load of boxes back with us, I haven't seen the contents for nearly 2 years.
So as you can imagine its really exciting unpacking them.
The boxes we brought this time are nearly all boxes of books, my poor long suffering Dad still has boxes of treasure filling up his spare bedroom back in Suffolk.
I keep finding embroidery and quilt books, which has made me reminise about my past life.
Back in the day's when NDS was just beginning I used to be a textile artist, I started dyeing fabric for my embroideries and quilts, at the beginning most of it was brown or yellow and dyed with whatever I could find in the hedgerows or in my garden.
I thought it might be nice to add a record of my art work and early dyeing attempts to my blog as they no longer have a website of their own, that disappeared when NDS took over my life.
My earliest dyeing attempts were in 1998/9, but I can't find any photo's.
The earliest example of my dyeing I can find is the photo below, it was a quilt called "Flower's for Tower's" and was made in response to 9/11 in 2001, I think it ended up in a private collection in America.
The pale pink/beige colour was probably dyed with bracken or tea or maybe even eucalyptus. The gold was onion skins.
The following photo's are of a series of quilted embroideries inspired during a holiday to Scotland.
One evening we came across a huge stag standing in the middle of a road, our local Suffolk deer seemed to disappear in the summer which made me think that maybe our deer went on holiday to Scotland too.
The bottom layer of these embroideries was pieced with my naturally dyed fabric and then I added layers of lovely nylon net to add more colour!
If only I knew what I now know about dyeing things might have been a bit different :-)
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