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One of the members of my quilt friendship group was given several bags full of old wool sweaters, pants and skirts. Someone had tried to felt a few of the wool sweaters and had shrunk the adult garments to doll size. Most of the wool in those garments were too stiff to use in our projects, but I thought if I overdyed one or two of them and cut them into narrow 1/8” and 1/4” strips they could be used as flower stems.
Some of the fabrics were dull and lifeless, so I cut them apart and then simmered them in a pot with the bold colors so that the colors would marry. Gene Shepherd demonstrates this in this video. Gene also has a book titled Prepared to Dye: Dyeing Techniques For Fiber Artists that details the marrying technique.
Here are the wools after dyeing and marrying the colors.
These are some of the married colors. The first piece on the left was gray, the second was a dirty white. The bold colors came from the fuchsia color in the center which used to be magenta, and the hot pink on the right. The bottom piece used to be a pale mint green.
The kelly green was an acid dye overdye of the baby blue.
I couldn’t felt the wool gabardine pants, but I didn’t want to throw them away so I decided they would be used for background material. In order to leave the least amount of fabric for the waste bin, I decided that I could get seven 7” x 7 1/2” blocks. I wanted nine, so I checked my closet and found a pair of wool gabardine pants that I hadn’t worn in 10 years (I was dreaming that I would someday fit into them again. Ha!) One of the legs became the final 2 blocks.
The design for the blocks had to include a flower because I had all those stems that needed to be used. And I love saltbox houses so I decided the design would include a simple saltbox house. I knew each house and flower would have to be different colors so I could use the wool I prepared. I knew also that I would add a border of randomly sized triangles to tie it all together.
I’m not making this into a tutorial, but I am providing a download for the pattern and instructions on how to make a single block and the piecing of the 9-block quilt. Each of you will have to decide how many blocks you will want to make. It could be a single block, a row of 3 or a 4-block quilt.
This is a great way to use up those small pieces from your wool stash. If, however, you are looking for some bundles of hand dyed wools to make your blocks, check out these yummy colors at Global Artisans. You can find hand dyed perle cotton and embroidery floss there too.
Happy Stitching!