Winners of the Rust-Tex Collection

Today I am posting about Bonnie Ouellette, she has been quilting for about 10 years and doing abstract and art quilting for the last 3 years. She founded a small art quilt group in her area to bring together other quilters who were looking for a more forward approach and begin to design their own work.

Tiffany Turquoise Mine

Bonnie loves collecting found objects so rust dyeing was right up her alley. She particularly likes to walk along railroad tracks, where she usually finds some very interesting rusted material. Rust dyeing is accidental. After examining the fabric Bonnie hopes an idea will come to her. This particular piece screamed the veins of a mine. She dyed the original fabric and thought it was a poor example of dyeing with too much white and just a little turquoise color so she "over rust dyed" it. The fun part was when she decided to discharge the rusted fabric with rust remover. Unfortunately, this process is not very well controlled so she had some work to do to remedy that. The mine entrance is from old wood found along the tracks. The mine cart is made from rusted parts from an old toy train. Bonnie loved making her piece for the Rust-Tex Collection and will continue to experiment with rust dyeing. Tiffany Turquoise Mine detail

To see similar pieces of Bonnie's look at her 2009 journal quilt entries by clicking on the link below:

http://www.quiltart.com/triple_play/artists/5.html