Finally I can breathe again....and another sneak peek

So I've been working like a crazy woman on this portrait quilt for the MArQ group show at the Anaba tea room which opens next week. The quilts are due at the gallery by Thursday at the very latest. Again--I am the queen of "just under the wire".
But...it is finished! And I can finally take a breath.

However, I have not yet taken pics of the whole thing, yet. They will come later. Until then I can post another sneak peek. Here is a couple of detail pictures of the tea lady's eye and cheek, just fused and then with threadpainting. This is the first time I've done anything like this, and I'm pretty happy with the result:

Last week I took a break from working on the tea lady, and attended a fabric dyeing class given by another member of MArQ--Nancy Kimpel. She was gracious enough to host a class in the gorgeous basement of her lovely new home out in Lake Country. She has a studio (and a stash) of which I am very envious, but that's another story.

Anyway, I've never dyed anything save for a pair of black gauzy pants that had faded, so it was a real treat to learn this. Nancy explained the low immersion process very well. First, we did a fat quarter in a single color (I chose yellow). Then we dyed a series of FQs in increasingly diluted dyes (I chose green). The last dyeing we did was using two or more colors on one FQ ( I chose yellow and green. I must have been hungry for bibb lettuce.)

I was very excited to get them home, throw them in the dryer and iron them. I even used the darkest green already--in my tea lady quilt!

I think I'll be dyeing in the future. Ha! Oh...I could inject a whole pile of "dyeing/dying" puns in here right now, but I shall restrain myself.