Another year another quilt!

The first layer of tie dye

It's that time of year again when The Heathlands Project Textile group embark on another quilt making adventure. This will be the fourth year I've run a quilt making project with them and it's really great to see how their ideas and skills have developed over this time. I'm excited to see how this one turns out, some of the group have been involved in all the quilts so have built up quite a knowledge base whereas others are new to textiles.

Group designs for the quilt

Tie dye samples ready to be untied

Selected sample (stitched)

Selected sample (pleated)

This year the group have decided to do a whole-cloth quilt with a patchwork border and they wanted to try some different tie-dye techniques and some batik. So, over the past few weeks we have been tie-dyeing and practising our batik skills. We began by doing small individual samples which we then looked at together to decide which techniques we want to use on the quilt. We are going to do two lots of tie dye to the base cloth so that we can try a bit of colour mixing too.

Tie dye samples

Working together

Mixing the dye

Batik

Batik

Batik patches ready for the dye bath

The first tie dye colour we chose was red and the group decided to twist and pleat the main fabric, seeing everyone working on the same piece at once was quite entertaining! We also did some batik patches to go into the red dye, they've come out really well and I can't wait to do the second lot of dyeing later this week!

Tied and ready for dyeing

In the dye bath

Adding the batik patches

Dyed batik patch

Dip dyed threads