Unplugged: Improv Flowers

One of the things I would like to learn is needle turn appliqué and planned to watch some videos on YouTube over the Easter break. As I said in this post, our WiFi was less than cooperative, so I started on a non-needle turn hand appliqué project instead which I finished today. 

With only scissors and a regular paint stick at hand, I cut freeform pieces from some scraps, pre-creased the folds, and glued them onto a basted background. The background is a piece of a thrifted shirt with a lovely woven pattern.

I only had a few colours of thread, but practise is practise, so I stitched down one shape after the other, quite enjoying the rhythm and watching the shapes take form. Looking at it, I can tell that I got better at tightening the stitches and smoothing the curves as I worked my way through the pieces.

With so much hand work put into it, I wanted to hand quilt it, also something at which I would like to get better. I outlined the appliqué with heavy weight blue thread, and quilted lines on both sides of the basting stitches before removing them.

The quilt was bound with a flowery grey binding from The Big Box of Binding before diving into my button box.

It was rather difficult to restrain myself from adding too many buttons because they all looked great, but I was good, I stuck to the plan only embellishing the flower heads.

I am very happy with the result of my hand appliqué practise, particularly with the improv quality, and will most certainly give hand appliqué another go.

Improving: Floating squares

One of my goals this year is to learn new things. I know I do new things all the time, but those are things I think of myself. Now I would like to learn from other people’s processes too. I first noticed a book reading up on Audrey’s blog Quilty Folk where she was working on improve quilting techniques, and the book kept popping up at other blogs as well -The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters by Sherri Lynn Wood. 

Improv quilting has not really been much on my radar, but it looked like fun, so I ordered the book and invited two of my friends who I knew would like to play along to join me in a study circle. I haven’t done any of those since I was a student, but I used to love group work, and thought it would be much more fun to do it together.

We had our first meeting this weekend, and agreed on some guidelines for our first score – the Floating squares.
Fabric 1: 12”*12”
Fabric 2: 12”*20”
Filler fabric: Unlimited
All of Fabrics 1 and 2 to be used up.

It was such a fun exercise, not using a ruler and all. It is safe to say that my cuts got straighter during the process, and the result is surprisingly flat. I was expecting to struggle a bit with the not thinking ahead part as my brain automatically makes order out of chaos starting organizing and calculating things, but I managed to work rather freely.

We'll meet again in a couple of weeks to evaluate the process and plan the next score. This is going to be a fun journey!

Thanks for stopping by!

Lighten up

I conducted a little experiment today. Inspired by a Facebook discussion, I wanted to show how the value of a fabric can be changed even after it has been quilted. My suggestions were quilting with a lighter thread or using markers or paint to make simple patterns.

My first step was quilting a medium value yellow solid fabric with matching thread, and dividing it into 9 sections of which the one in the middle would be left for comparison. I used a Hera marker to mark lines to keep them invisible.

Then I picked 8 things to add to the sections; I chose not to add anything bright white:
1 A light yellow variegated thread
2 A bright yellow thread
3 A light grey thread
4 A black thread
5 A thin black marker and a grey Promarker pen
6 A thick black marker
7 A orange Promarker pen
8 A white Uni Posca pen

I quilted a simple meandering pattern with all the different threads and made simple patterns with the markers. 

It was quite interesting to see how much impact these simple tools had on the yellow fabric.

1 The light yellow variegated thread

2 The bright yellow thread

3 The light grey thread

4 The black thread

5 The thin black marker and grey Promarker pen

6 The thick black marker

7 The orange Promarker pen

8 The white Uni Posca pen - a rather subtle yet noticeable effect

The most interesting, however was to look at it from a distance. 

It looks rather different depending on the background.

Photographing colours is never easy!

Even from a distance you can see the different sections.

There you go; you can indeed change the value of a fabric - even after quilting.

Thanks for stopping by:)

White on white

Have you ever thought about

how playing around with your camera and different light

can teach you a thing or two about quilting?

One of my goals this year is to use more white in my work. I tend to shy away from white unless it is a neutral or bold design element. It’s the same way in our home; I’ll always pick the lightest of grey instead of white, so I want to start playing more with whites. I have, by the way, set quite a few small goals for myself, which I will get back to as I work at them. So far I have started at
- becoming a confident zipperista
- using more yellow
- embracing white.

So, you can’t make an omelet without breaking any eggs, or use white (or yellow for that matter) without a white fabric stash and I had to purchase some new fabric. It’s not like white on whites makes your heart sing by looking at them on a screen, but fabric shopping is fabric shopping and still quite fun I’d say.

 

The package arrived the other evening and my camera was out anyway, so I took a few pictures in (halogen) lamp light.

Then I repeated the process the next day in daylight.

Can you see the positive/negative effect when they are next to each other?

It’s quite striking, isn’t it.

So, hanging on a wall, the white on white fabrics will look very different depending on the light

– meaning that if you put your colours together in lamp light, they may look totally different the very next day.

I always knew this truth about colours, but not even white is only white, is it.

Colour on a Sunday

With it only being 30 days until Christmas and I haven’t even started planning anything yet, I decided to do something useful like playing a little with colour today. There is a challenge in which I have wanted to participate, but time is becoming an issue. I have planned all the important quilty things out in my head like the design, the fabrics and the techniques, but not the time to actually do the work. Sometimes getting everything out and do the prepwork feels quite overwhelming, don’t you think?

Anyway, today I finally had a go at the first step: prettying up a few recycled tablecloths using a box of Neocolor II which I have been looking forward to try for a very long time. In fact I have two boxes purchased separately a long time ago and an even longer time ago, and was planning to make a third purchase of the same box when I had the brilliant idea of checking my paint drawer.

First out was a piece of polyester sateen from a repurposed bridal shawl. A fellow guild member of mine brought a car trunk full of them to a guild meeting after rescuing them from being thrown into a dumpster by a bridal store. My part of the loot, two shopping bags filled to the brim with luscious whites, has been waiting for their time to shine, and I am happy to oblige.

I made a little scribble with the crayons

and added a little water. The wet paint does not soak into the fabric at all, so that’s a big no-no. There may be some water repellent stuff in the fabric, but washing is not an option.

Next I ironed freezer paper to the back of strips of the table cloths and drew some simple patterns,

and then added water with a paint brush.

 It looked ok, but the paint kept on bleeding, so I tried to iron it dry. It was a mess, thankfully a rather bland mess as the colours faded away when drying, but still a mess.

I re-drew a new pattern while the fabrics were still damp, and that seemed to work much better, although I had to do them over again once more before I was happy.

Now they are drying properly so I can move on to step two tomorrow.

So, what did I learn today? First, Neocolor is not for polyester sateen, but I have some transfer paint that I picked up in Birmingham back in August that probably will do the trick. Second, when painting with crayons on coloured fabric, I should not paint it out with a wet brush. Instead I will try to dampen the fabric with a spray bottle and take it from there. And third, double woven, hand woven and linen table cloths may not be the most appropriate fabric for water-soluble crayons, and now I know.

Not much point in doing all this if you don’t learn anything, right?

Wishing you all a lovely Sunday!

Vishy voshy vision

I had a vision. I would add perfect little splashes of colour to the Whatever quilt by adding diluted ink drop by drop. I could see them in my mind, spreading out through the layers and the excess getting soaked up by the bottom cotton fabric layer. Sounds perfect, right?

Well. I don't have that vision any more. Thank goodness I made a little test piece first. The ink did not behave gracefully at all, not making much of a mark on the organza layer.

That being said, ink blobs could be fun on a different project, so I'm adding it to the growing list of mix-it-up options.

This is not my first time being wrong-visioned. Most of the time it doesn't even matter, I can work with whatever result I get, but when the project is to be in a show, I'll make a test cloth. This is the test cloth for The Reef of Re quilt. It has all the layers and has been somewhat quilted.

 

See all the black seams and dots and lines? That's where I have been testing different decorative stitching, markers, stamping and inking. Only the ink dots made it to the quilt, the rest of the ideas were archived. I did not think all the techniques would work, but I had to try them out anyway. When good ideas can go wrong, bad ideas could go right, right?

Some test cloths are worth finishing, but this one is being used for ongoing testing, the last one being yarn couching zig zag settings. 0,5 mm difference really does matter.

After a sunny and rather warm week, Saturday is nothing like that. Oh well, we'll figure out something to do, grandson is well and life is good.

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend!

Say it with flowers

When it comes to my quilts, there is nothing I love more than seeing them being loved to death. While we were setting the table for my mother’s party, I finally took the opportunity to get a few quick shots of her much beloved flower quilt. It was a present for her birthday back in 2004 and has spent the better part of the past 9 years on my parents’ dining table.

It has 8 different flowers bouquets in sheer vases, with lupines being one of them as they grew all over grandma’s garden. The flowers were sketched as I moved along and drawn directly onto fusible.

You have no idea how much brain activity it took to get those vases perfectly shaped and washable at the same time. Time well spent indeed as they have held up 9 years of use and washing.

The names of each flower are quilted along the side of the bouquets. I used rayon threads which was a bad choice as the threads have broken quite a few places along the edge of the table. Next time I’ll use polyester threads for sure.

You can see the shape of the round table being imprinted onto the quilt by the sun. It’s bound to happen no matter how much it’s turned ever so often to avoid just that.

This is a picture of a picture from 2004, before digital cameras and other fancy gadgets.

The colours look way too dark, but you get an idea of the overall new-quilt-look.

The strange thing is that my mother is not a big fan of yellow and orange and yet this is her all time favourite quilt.