Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Quilt Guild - Marquetta Johnson

Monday night at The Chattahochee Evening Stars' Quilt Guild meeting we had the pleasure of fabric artist Marquetta Johnson visiting with us. She held a workshop to teach us her technique for "no mess" fabric dyeing. Well, no mess looks something like this...

(Melissa and Kathy, aka the mom, hard at work)

but I suppose it is less messy than other methods of fabric dyeing. Now, when Marquetta was introduced our guild vice president spoke of her personal relationship with her, but she falied to mention that Marquetta Johnson has her fiber art on display at The Coca Cola Corporation, The Atlanta Airport and even at the Department of the Interior in Washington among other places. She has been on HGTV and PBS and frequently published. One would never know while listening to her talk and teach that she is so renowned because she is just pleasantly chatty, friendly and downright funny. How she managed to get forty or so women all moving through the same steps to get our fabric dyed in a pretty short time slot was nothing short of amazing (much like herding cats I would think). Anytime anyone expressed doubts as to if what they were doing was correct she would just exclaim "You just wait, that is going to turn out soooo beautiful!".
She uses Createx Air Brush Colors for Fabric to do her dyes, applied with a squirt bottle after some fancy fabric folding and rubber banding. I love how my fabrics turned out but of course have tons of other ideas for things to do with this technique. Here are my samples set out to dry and the final result, followed by some links to Marquetta Johnson's website gallery and work.

Marquetta Johnson's Website

Her International Fellows award page (where you can also click on her biography)

And here is her book on Amazon

2 comments:

Kathy Bridges said...

Nice Job Kate! Why do I look buck-toothed in that picture?
Does she know about your blog?
the mom

smshorty said...

Hey! The samples on the foam plate are mine....I want royalties!

Shannon