Goin' to the birds

I had a busy weekend. I had to make 8 of these for a swap in Surface Design. I'm not sure how I feel about them yet. I'm one of those people that after spending a lot of time on something like this, when they're done, I wonder, "do they look ok?" "did they turn out ok?" I'm always so critical of myself. I did like how the fabric turned out, below, before I made them into birds.

The sky blue (a somewhat lighter color than I would normally use) was actually a mistake from a previous project. (Glad I held onto it!) I then layered a metallic eyelash yarn, black Misty Fuse then another eyelash yarn on top.

I also dyed my cat, Matisse, this weekend. No, it was not intentional. I do all of my dyeing in my garage & when I'm working, I leave the door open from the living room into the garage so my 2 boys, Matisse & Sydney can play & do what cats like to do when checking out new places. I was dyeing some of my neon green for a quilt that I'm working on & decided to make up some extra dye to paint some Tyvek. I don't like how lightly the dye goes onto the Tyvek, so I actually pool it onto the Tyvek & let it dry over night. When I finished, I would have sworn that Matisse was in the house, so I closed the door. A couple minutes later I went back out into the garage & there was Matisse on the other side of the door. I didn't think anything of it. Half an hour later, my husband noticed this green stain on the living room floor. I had NO idea where this had come from since I never brought any dye into the house. As I was cleaning up that spot, we started to notice, little green kittie paw prints all over the living room carpet, up the stairs onto the wooden floor in the kitchen, all the way through onto our cork floor in the dining room. We snatched up Matisse & sure enough, that little boy had 4 neon green paws. We were able to rinse most of it off, however, it did dye his feet a little bit.

My next worry, how bad did the garage look? It was a massacre in there. Remember that pool of dye on the Tyvek? Matisse had walked through it, realized his feet were wet & shook them all over the counter & walls. He then proceeded to walk the entire length of the counter, slid down my white cabinets & continued onto the concrete floor. Luckily, every thing cleaned up quite well, even the carpet. I think my saving grace with the carpet was that, the dye I mixed up for the Tyvek, I didn't add the soda ash so the dye was never able to bond with anything. Unfortunately, I have no pictures to show you of Matisse's paws, since he has dark pads & the green just wouldn't photograph well enough to show.

It is kind of funny looking back on it now, however, when it happened, I found NO humor in it whatsoever.

(oh & by the way, my Mariner's won their game yesterday, 5-2)