tutu tops

Gave in to temptation today and went through my bags of scraps looking for tutu-top wherewithal. It turns out I have enough red/orange/yellow scraps to make a pretty nice flame-colored top, and enough purple/blue/green scraps to make a nice peacock-iridescent top. (I also still have some peacock tail feathers, and some sword feathers as well.) I’ve also given in to temptation and ordered some silk/rayon velvet (some burnout velvet and some regular), which I plan to dye in interesting colors and incorporate into the tops. I already have a large collection of white silk remnants that would be perfect for dyeing, so I think I have all the materials needed for quite a few pieced/crazy-quilt tops. I’m rather looking forward to playing with dyes again. Time to dig out the books on surface design for fabric…stamping, dyeing, marbling, resist, silk-painting…the sky’s the limit, really.

I am, however, honest-to-goodness going to try to work on the book at the same time. Really.

I have now rewritten the outline through Day Six, and expect to finish it in another day or two. Lena isn’t coming over until next week, though she and I are meeting up tomorrow so I can give her some stuff, so I’ll have some time on my own to play with stuff.

I really like the idea of crazy-quilting this. I’m going to start with the red/orange/yellow top and see how that goes–I expect I’ll make some mistakes and it won’t look as good as it potentially could with more experience, but the beauty of the AIDS Ride is that nobody really takes anything seriously. So it doesn’t need to be perfect.

A gorgeous piece of champagne/gold striped silk also arrived in the mail today. I think I’m going to use it for a top and decorate with silver and black fabric roses, but I’m not sure.