Onions and Lupines

I've been saving onion skins for almost a year.  They've been piling up in a little box drying...waiting for me to do something.  So today I decided they needed to ... well...be cooked, so to speak.  But then I realized that a years worth of onion skins was actually quite a bit.  So first I decided to wrap a bundle.  I've read about the disco challenge and last year thought about doing it for sooooo long that I never did it.  Well, it came around again, on January 1, and here I am thinking about it.  But...ta da...I jumped into action and wrapped a bundle and hung it in a tree.

This is a cotton hankerchief with several leaves then a piece of white felt then some lace.  There is a mixture of acorns, leaves, onion skins and a few other goodies in the layers.

This is part of the Erosion Project. You can click on the link and find out all about it as well as read and link to other people making bundles.

Then I took an other piece of silk laid it out flat and sprinkled onions all over it. 

I really loved the color of the red onions scattered between the yellow skins.  I sprayed this with vinegar then covered it with the other half of the silk and sprayed some more.

Then I rolled it up.

Then I rolled it some more and wrapped it with rubber bands......

and finally I stuck it in a jar.

It now gets to wait for a month!  This whole thing is lesson in patience.  The Erosion Project doesn't get opened until April.  The jar gets opened in February...the end of February.

The next project for the day was the left over onion skins.

 

I put them in the crock pot and added water and citric acid.  I let them simmer a bit then added some silk.  This I left on high in the crockpot for about 2 hours.  The studio smelled like French Onion soup....yumm.  But before I went to fix dinner, I also added some Acid Fast dyes to another crockpot and stuffed in some silk and citric acid.  Every time the dye bath exhausted I added a different color and some more citric acid.  This is for the strips between the quilt squares.

This is lighter than what the color really is.  There are lots of bronze and blue tones in this.  I'm happy with this although I would have liked it to be a bit darker and the leaves could be light.  So I may have to overdye this later.

My last project of the day was another quilt square.  This is the lupine square that I drew last week.

I'm pretty happy with the color in this...the green wool coming through the various purples is yummy.

Enough...the onion soup is cooling and I'll have a picture of the silk from the dye pot for the next post.