Greetings and welcome to my blog! If you are blog hopping and new to my blog let me introduce myself. My name is Jamie Kalvestran and I have been a quilter for about 30 years. I come from a long line of quilters, my mother is and my great grandmother was a quilter. I am a product designer who worked in Sporting Goods and Toy Design for many years. During that time I was also quilting away. Today I combine my love for design and quilting by designing patterns for you under the Scrap-bags™ label. My patterns are for handbags, purses, totes and quilts.

To qualify for the grand prizes of this blog hop all you need to do is comment on all 10 blogs during the blog hop. If you comment on all 10 blogs, you will be entered in a drawing for the following gift bags, filled with fabulous quilting goodies from all of us:GE Designs, Anka's Treasures, Perkins Dry Goods, Rosebud's Cottage, This 'N' That, New Leaf Stitches, Atkinson Designs, Cedar Canyon Textiles, Scrap-Bags™ and Quilted Treasures.

1st Prize A gift bag worth $200
2nd Prize A gift bag worth $60
3rd Prize A gift bag worth $40

To qualify for my own Blog Hop drawing you must do two things. #1 sign up as a follower on the left column of this blog and #2 leave a comment on this post. Then you will be in the running for a drawing that includes a trio of patterns. The trio pack includes (1-the Fat Quarter Scrap-bag Pattern, 2-the Easy Zip Wallet Pattern, and 3-the Checkbook Cover pattern)

There will be TEN winners total each receiving a trio pack of patterns! So join me as a follower AND leave me a comment to be in the running! When you comment make sure and let me know that you've signed up as a follower and make sure I can contact you by email. (I think you may need to sign up with google to accomplish that ? I am not sure.)

My tutorial is about discharge dyeing.

Discharge dyeing of fabrics is easy and fun.
If you like projects that have unpredictable beautiful results you will LOVE this.

Here is what you will need:

• Pre-washed 100% quilting cotton fabrics
• Three tubs or buckets
• Bleach
• Vinegar or a bleach stop product.
• Water
• Rubber gloves
• Spray or squirt bottles, eyedroppers, paint brushes etc.
• Super good ventilation or better yet a place to work outdoors (the mixture of bleach and vinegar gives off a toxic vapor that is not good for you to breath. So don't skimp on the ventilation!!!)
• OLD clothes that you will get bleach on no matter how hard you try not to!!!
• Any or all of the following - stencils, leaves, cheesecloth, rocks and twigs, torn cardboard or anything else you can think of . . .

Fill the first tub with plain water.
Fill the second tub with water and vinegar (approximately 1 part vinegar to 2 parts water) /or a bleach stop product.
Fill the third tub with plain water.
Fill a spray or squirt bottle with the bleach and water mixture. (approximately 1 part bleach to 2 parts water), or put it in a cup or dish if you are going to brush it on. I used a squirt bottle for the fabrics shown below.

Lay out the fabric you want to dye and place items on top of the fabric then spray, squirt or sprinkle the bleach water combination on top of the fabric and items. The items will block the bleach creating a resist. Wait a few minutes until the fabric starts to fade from the bleach. The longer you wait the more it will fade. Also the stronger the beach mixture the faster it will fade.

You can layer the process too, below I used a
fern for the first bleaching and then this weed
for the second go round.

Above I used leaves and below I added another
layer of cheesecloth on top of the leaves.

Ferns and Rocks

When you are happy with the amount of discharge remove the items and rinse the fabric in the first bucket of water. Then place the fabric in the vinegar and water (or bleach stop) tub to stop the bleaching process. You can let it sit in the vinegar for a while and then place it in the last water tub for a final rinse before washing and drying in your washing machine. Here is a pile of fabrics ready for the washing machine.


Below are some of my examples from one day of disdyeing from last week:




Here you can see the 'before' fabrics on top of the 'after' fabrics:


Below is a green solid with most of the green discharged out. This is the one that had the rocks on it in one of the above photos. Below in the next photo you will see it transform even further with some hand quilting . . .

There are many things you can do with disdyed fabrics. Here are some examples of what I like to do. I love to sit in front of the TV or listen to the radio and hand quilt. Now, I am not a typical hand quilter. I don't follow any rules. My stitches are not THAT even. Medium to small. I didn't use a hoop on these samples either. I know you are thinking "what a rebel!" To top it off, I pulled the thread TOO tight creating a wonderful texture. This will eventually become a purse or part of a larger bag.

Below, I folded three fabrics 'according style' and
held them with rocks and then sprayed the bleach mixture across the top.

Here is the first unfolding of that technique, kind of boring I thought.

So I re-folded it and redid it until I started liking what I had . . .

Here is the original fabric on top of the disdyed fabric.

Then I hand quilted, using dark thread on the light areas and light thread on the darker areas.

And then I made this sweet little bag, using the Fat-Quarter Scrap-bag™ pattern.

So play, experiment and have fun! Heaven only knows what you'll create!!!

I hope you are enjoying the blog hop!

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and/or

Simply, Comment on all ten blogs and
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P.S. Feel free to follow me on my giant shop hop across the USA on Quiltshops.blogspot.com