The Very Hungry Caterpillar saga - the final instalment - Olivia

When I bought the Very Hungry Caterpillar quilt kit (about 8 months ago), Olivia took the photo from the kit, climbed up on the couch and sat gazing at it lovingly. So I bought more fabric for a quilt for her - but then I had to buy more after passing the first quilt on to another child. She loved the quilts so much that I had to hide them whenever she came around. 

Finally, on her second birthday, she became the proud owner of her very own Very Hungry Caterpillar Quilt - and here she is enjoying it.

And I'm not making any more!

Zigzag hemline

I made this dress for Olivia from a New Look pattern (6136). I'd never done a zig-zag hemline before and managed the sew the lower band on upside down, so had to re-do it. A very suitable outfit for the very warm weather we've been experiencing this summer.

I can dye a rainbow

I've been very busy in recent months but that didn't stop me attending a fabric dyeing workshop at the end of November. The workshop was run by Cecile from uniquestitching and was a lot of fun, plus we didn't have to take anything. Cecile provided morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea plus all the fabric, dyes and anything else we required.

On the first day, we played around with colour: a rainbow, tints and tones and doing a run from a primary to a secondary colour.

The next day we looked at resists, particularly folding and scrunching.

I'm not sure where these pieces fitted in but I like the result.

The delicious raspberry colour in these pieces resulted from adding a small amount of chocolate brown to magenta. The fabric on the right is Radiance, a silk-cotton mix.

This is my favourite piece - it came out of the 'slops' bucket. At the end of each exercise, we emptied the leftover dyes into a bucket with a piece of fabric in it. At first, it looked just murky brown and I was very disappointed until I washed it out. It's actually a bit darker than this - a dark, rich rust colour with bright turquoise splashes.

All in all, a fantastic day and I'm looking forward to doing some more dyeing in the not too distant future, although I have more than enough hand-dyed fabric to go on with - I brought home 8-9 metres of fabric from the workshop.