Why am I doing this anyway?

As a busy studio artist actively engaged in the art of katazome I could be called crazy to start a blog, but there is just so much to share! I have a pretty nice web site nautilus-fiberarts.com with a lot of finished pieces, and a brief description of the process, but the day-to-day work and the development of designs is beyond the scope of a web site, especially when I have to depend on my long-suffering husband to keep it up to date...... Right now I am in the throes of completing a lot of new quilts and noren (Japanese door curtains) to take with me to Japan for an exhibit coming up in early November. It has been raining outside so you should see the bathroom festooned with drying fabric!

Having had a full summer of teaching and getting our daughter off to college I am running behind! But this trip is going to be so fabulous that it seems a pity not to get the blog started now so I know what I am doing when we have internet connections over there. I am sure there are a lot of "bells and whistles" that I will learn to add as time goes on. Right now it is just the basics.

I finished dyeing the last quilt top today and will deliver it to the machine quilter tomorrow. Thank goodness for Linda's good instincts, which match my vision so perfectly. I would die for a long-arm machine at times like this, but I can't justify the expense or the floor space for the amount of time I would use it, so when I get in a crunch I unashamedly rely on her skills.

This is a detail of the big quilt she finished yesterday. It is silk doupioni overdyed with gray dye after I put the resist paste on. I have been cutting a lot of small stencils from organic patterns in the last several years and this is a sampler of all of them. I think I will call it "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral". Now I have to bind it......