Earthquakes and hurricanes

Life in Maryland has been exciting this week.  Right now, we are anticipating the arrival of Irene, a pesky hurricane stirring up the east coast.  But life in the studio must go on!  I have finished dyeing and laminating most of my next project - the remaining assemblage is all that is required but will be time consuming.  This project has been exciting and frustrating.  Exciting because my design that I had tucked away in my head has held up and I have pushed through many of the technical issues.  For instance, getting a complementary color progression from yellow to blue violet took about two months of steady effort.  Why?  Well, the major time sink was finding the two complements that best performed for my purpose - having a progression of color from yellow to blue-violet that did not progress into 'red' territory.  I paired up the following combinations over the summer to make samples: golden yellow - grape, sun yellow - grape, lemon yellow - boysenberry, lemon yellow - blue-violet, sun yellow - blue violet (the winning combo).  I had previously done a lot of sample dyeing of different concentrations of dyes, OWG, process time,etc.  I made an incredible number of spectacular colors - particularly grays (yum) but didn't really achieve what I wanted until I did a simple 9-bucket full water immersion color gradation.  Once the dyeing was done, a steep learning curve on laminating fusible interfacing to the silk, stitiching and then fusible web lamination for the next steps.  Hope to have pics posted very soon.