A Tale of Two Uglies

We’ve all made these – something that’s just plain ugly to our eyes. I made the square at left as a potential sample for my manipulations class. I really did not care for it so the first recourse was to overdye it.

Still no improvement, I think – two layers of color, but very flat.

The next step is naturally (in this studio anyway) discharge. I decided to fold it back into a triangle, then I pole-wrapped it with string. What an improvement. This piece sold last week at the Quilt Fest of New Jersey – I can’t wait to see what happens to it next!

The second fabric was part of an ugly fabric exchange. Nicely dyed, but not a great color. Again, the steps it went through didn’t immediately improve it, but at the end it’s pretty neat.

Here I have put the fabric into my wooden pleater. The piece is longer than the pleater could accommodate, so I taped the folds together before moving on to the next length of cloth.

Here is the fabric in a tote with thickened dye spread across the pleats in stripes. I think I used an old tin can with both ends removed to hold the thickened dye. Uglies are great to experiment with.

After batching, this is how it came out. A good illustration for an experiment, but still blah.

The final picture shows a section of the fabric that was folded into a mandala from the center, like the first piece above. Again, not a huge improvement, so this time I pole-wrapped it with string and dyed it with a dark brown-black. It is now living with my class samples.

Thanks for looking, and don’t forget to stop by and say Hi at the Lancaster Spring Quilt Show at the Host Hotel and Resort. The show runs 3/13 – 3/16. If you sign up for our mailing list, you will get a admission discount coupon, and a DippyDyes discount coupon. Thanks!