Getting Ready

I've been asked to do a demonstration next Saturday at the gallery where our Guild show is. My friend Diane and I are doing "Nuno or Not"....I'm doing Nuno and she is doing Not. Diane decided to do a Calla Lily pin....it's lovely. I'm doing Nuno, of course. I'll be demonstrating a piece like those I made for my quilt. At first I tried flowers but all of them were pictures of flowers I will put in my quilt. My DH likes fish so I decided I'd do a fish. It is one from an Aegean vase...not a true original ... but a take-off. Sigh...I felt under the gun to get a simple design done and get things going. So...here is the design.... a simple fish with some space in the body to improvise in the demo. I looked at all my silks...sorted them out and decided to do some dyeing. Initially when I thought I would do a botanical piece I needed a lighter green. So I came up with with this color. I've added some silk haboti, and some silk thread and ribbon.

I thought I would do sunflowers and so I looked at wool roving and found I didn't have any brick red. So I did another pot.








Then as it sat and perked along...I came up with the fish idea. I looked through the blues and decided I didn't have any Sea Blues. So back to the third dye pot. I only have 2 white pots....I've found the white helps me with color mixing...but on to the black pot with blues.
So....again silk haboti at 4.5 mm with silk ribbon and threads I've decided to try dyeing my own threads for embroidery .... just thought it might be fun. And I like variegated threads...and with silks I just can't find what I want.

So here is my little kit to take.... The purple is the background of the fish...and the orange is the main color...the deep blue will be the eyes and the streaming fins. Not sure if I should add a 5th color for details on the fish....like scales...or something more fanciful.

So next weekend I'll take pictures of the show....so many lovely pieces.