Hand Dyed Blocks and Optical Illusions

I belong to an online group called Dyehards. It is a group of very interesting, like minded gals who love to dye fabric. In this year's challenge we are doing a block swap and the current block is to be a monochromatic block. I chose cobalt blue, dyed a gradation and created this block. I am trying to play around with optical illusions so I selected this attic windows block and tried to put balls with background shadows in the window panes. I rather like the way it turned out!

This block is the first one that I did for this year's block challenge. It is a black/gray gradation. The fabric I used was Nature's Way and the dye is Dharma's New black. As you can see (I hope) I was trying to create an optical illusion with this block. It was fun to do and an interesting use of the hand dyed gradations. Thinking of a block and then creating the fabric for it is fun. Hand dyeing your fabric allows you to create gradations and such that cannot be purchased. During the rest of the year I will be doing blocks using comlimentary colors, triad colors and other such color combinations. It will be interesting to see if I can keep the optical illusion thing going when I have to use multiple colors.