Australian show

This quilt I made for an Australian show. The organisers do not only give a theme, you are also to use 80% of the challenge fabric they send you. This year the theme is 'take flight'. The challenge fabric was a yellow flower on a pale green background. I incorporated the fabric along with lots of others in the pieced background. For quilting design I had doves. The appliqued doves are made from my own handdyed fabrics. Size of this quilt is 60cmx65 cm (23,6"x25,6"). I received the fabric some 2 weeks ago and today the quilt will go into the mail. Not bad, don't you think?.

white

The last couple of days I have been working with white fabric only. The two pictures above are two small quiltlets - each 20cmx20cm (8"x8") - which I made for a show in Germany. The title of the show is 'How Amazing' and they requested to experiment with textile and non-textile materials with a focus on unusual techniques. For the quiltlet on the left I printed a photo of cracked ice on a transparency and added this to the fabric with eyelets. The fabric was first quilted. Additional beads and snowflake charms are added. On the quiltlet on the right I used heated lutrador, hid a cardboard circle under it and quilted it. The show in Germany opens in spring and there are plans for various venues. Both quiltlets are for sale, euro 45,-- each.


These pictures shows even smaller quiltlets, each is 15cmx15cm (6"x6"). I made these for a swap Lenna Andrews is organising. The swap is called 'Shades of White Quilties' and I used all kind of white stuff for it: cotton balls, beads, gauze, paper, decorative yarn, shells, sheers and punchinella.

effect of sunlight

The pictures you see here are both from the same quilt. The one at the left was taken when the quilt was only a few months old. The picture at the left I took this morning, two years later. This quilt was hanging at a wall facing south/southwest next to a window and it got a lot of sunlight. One fabric was already beginning to loose color very soon as you can see on the picture at the left. Now more fabrics have begun to change and also some of the thread I used are fading. A lesson to learn. If you cherish a quilt, make certain that it does not hang in a place where it catches the sunlight.

ice dyeing and painted fabric

A friend of mine Kelly lives in Minnesota where they have lots of snow. She was able to do some snow dyeing this week. At my place there is no snow but it gave me the idea to do some ice dyeing. The picture on the left is the result. I presoaked some P&B fabric in soda, crunched it and placed it in a container. This container I put outside for the night. Although we do not have snow, it has been freezing the last couple of days. The next morning I brought the container inside and poured a mixture of deep navy and tangerine (both ProChem's) over it and let it batch for about 6 hours. After rinsing I got this lovely fabric.

The fabric at the right is the fabric I intend to use for my 2nd Quilten Speciaal quilt. I dyed it with a mixture of two blacks and when that was done I used 2 different coasters with Dynaflow black and Lumiere pewter paint to create this design. On this background I will be using black and silver lutrador, buttons, quilting and maybe some more painting.

Quilten speciaal quilt

These are pictures of the final assessment quilt for the Quilten Speciaal Course. The picture at the right is a detail of the quilt. The quilting of the ammonite is finished. It is looking better than without the quilting, but I am still not very happy with it. I have been trying to find a word which describes it the best, and I think that boring comes close to it. The idea was to work with structure(s) and that I think is accomplished. The green/blue holes in the ammonite are made from sheers which have been heatgunned (is that a verb?). Quilting on the ammonite has been done with a blueish thread.
Next session of the course is on February 8. I will finish this quilt before that day anyway and take it with me but I will also bring another one. For that I have dyed the fabric with a mixture of two blacks and rollerpainted pewter lumiere over it. Will heatset it tomorrow and work on it the coming days.

several quilts at the same time

Wright now I am working on 3 quilts at the same time.
For the Challengequiltgroup I did most of the background. Today I am putting the binding around it. After that only beeds have to be added and I cannot do that until they arrive.
For the c&g quilt I have designed the pattern for the quilting. On this quilt I will first do all the quilting and after that I will fuse applique the birds.
Than the 3rd quilt which is the final assessment for the Quilten Special course. I am making an ammonite for that. The sheers have been heated and placed on the background. So has the fabric layer on top of that. Now I am satinstitching all of this. But I am not completely happy with it. It is looking more dull than I had expected. Maybe I can improve on it with the quilting. If it does not, no harm is done because I have another idea in my mind. This quilt I intend to make anyway. Not sure now whether it will be as an assessment piece or not. The background fabric I dyed today and it is at the moment batching. With this quilt I want to use black mottled fabric, black and silver/white lutrador, Lumiere paint and quilting.
Of none of these I have pictures at the moment. They will come later.

new designs

The last couple of days I have been working on two new designs. For my C&G course I have to make the 5th assessment - a wallhanging. For this I want to make a wholecloth quilt and I will use one of my handdyes. On it I will applique a flock of birds. The picture on the right shows roughly what I intend to do. The size of this quilt will be around 40"x40" (or 100x100 cm).

The picture on the left shows an ammonite. This will be my design for the final assessment I have to make for the Quilten Speciaal course. This course was organised by the Dutch Quilters Guild. The background fabric will be a dark blue handdye on which I intend to use sheers and lots of quilting. The theme for this assesmment has to be texture. Size of this quilt will be around 40"x30" (or 100x75 cm).

this and that

I have been working on the design for my final assessment for the c&g course, but that is not yet finished so no picture yet. Instead of that design I can show you two pictures of what I worked on yesterday and today. The picture at the left is a journal quilt with the theme 'mask'. I used painted lutrador, sequins, flower, stick, fake hair on it and some quilting. The picture at the right shows 5 little boxes made with the pattern from the Winter 2005 issue of Quilting Arts. All the fabric I used for these boxes was handdyed and handpainted. Both the journal quilt as well as the little boxes are for my surfacing group.

challenge quilt

On my surfacing group we are working on a challenge quilt. The first round was make a quilt (40"x40") based on your surroundings. This quilt is the inspiration source for the 2nd round. As my inspiration source I choose the colors Marijke used in her quilt. I handdyed and handpainted the fabric and made it into a convergence quilt. Not my usual technique, but I like the result.

party!

My surfacing group celebrated last month its first anniversay and for this occasion we all made a small quiltlet - journal size - with material we received from 2 members. There is no co-ordination between them so it is always a surprise what you get. And the material you receive have to be used! Cobi send me some Chinese looking fabric and some blue lutrador and Susan send me a variety of beads and decorative yarns. With this I created the 4 ladies who are dancing at a party as you can see on the picture.

black/white quilt and painted fabric

Today I finished a small quilt - about 15" square - of which I can only show a detail on this blog as I intend to send it to a Dutch Show. For this quilt I used a black gradation and decorative yarns. The show is in March so till this time I cannot show you the full picture.
The other 2 fabrics are handdyes on which I added Lumiere paints. I placed different type of coasters and bubblewrap under the fabric and rollerpainted the paint over it. On purpose I had not cleaned my foamroller in between so some of the copper/gold paint is also on the blue piece. These fabrics I dyed/painted for the second step of the challenge quilt we are doing on my surfacing group. The fabric is prepared so now I can start working on the quilt. Size is again 40" square and my inspiration source is the colors Marijke used in her sunsetquilt.

Fibers journal quilt + swap

On my surfacing group we had to make a theme based journal quilt last month. The theme was fibers. It took some time before I got inspiration but today I made the journal quilt. As fibers I used different colors of blue angelina and chrystalina. Placed this onto a handdyed blue fabric. As quilting pattern I used triangles because on top of the angelina are a number of felt triangles. It is always difficult to take a picture of angelina, but I think you get an idea of the quilt.
The picture on the right shows a chinese coin block. I made two of these for members of my dyeing group. The strips are made from - again - handdyed fabrics. It is a great way of using up scraps but I am glad that I finished them as actually I am not a 'block-person' :-)

catching up

Today I had time to do some catching up. The last couple of weeks I spend most of my time working on the digitalis quilt, but that is done. I worked on 2 pieces for the complex cloth round robin I am participating in. As technique I did rollerpainting. For one piece I placed a coaster under the fabric, for the other one I placed bubble wrap under it. Put some Lumiere textile paint on a plate and applied the paint with a roller.
The left and center picture will go into the mail to Kelly tomorrow so that she can put an extra layer on the fabric. The picture on the right is a piece I did just for fun.

digitalis quilt

At last my digitalis quilt is finished! When I was writing down the evaluation of this triptych for Linda and Laura I came to a total number of hours I spend on this piece of 84!! Most of it was used for making the pieced background. It was a lot of work but I am happy with the result.
It was the first time that I made a triptych and one of the practical issues I stumbled upon is that with a piece like this you have to make a label for each panel. Just to be certain that when it is at a show that they hang it properly I mentioned on each label whether the panel should be at the left, center or right side. Most of the time I do not create my art with a specific show in the back of my mind, but I am thinking of sending this piece to coming year's Festival of Quilts.

digitalis quilt

The second panel of my digitalis quilt is finished too. The pictures show two details of the quilting, a hummingbird and some snails. After all, every garden has some snails :-)

If I can keep up this speed the whole triptych will be finished Saturday. Then at last I will have time to catch up with some other commitments. I am way behind with making journalquilts, there are 3 waiting to be created.

quiltswap

I am a member of Quiltswap. This is a yahoogroup on which we swap a quilt twice a year. The picture here shows the quilt I received today from Karol Kusmaul. Title of the quilt is New Hope. It is a lovely green with variegated pink/purple threadpainting. Thanks Karol!

digitalis quilt

Today 2 detail photos of the digitalis quilt I am working on. As you can see the satinstitching is been done and I am now working of the quilting. This type of quilt does not want stippling but more decorative quilting so I decided to add flowers and plants to the quilt. Maybe some dragonflies, or birds will be added too. I guess that I can finish one part of the triptych tomorrow. When that is done I show it here.

digitalis quilt

Today I had time to continue working on my digitalis quilt. I added the batting and the batting to the top. Then I picked up my rotary cutter and cut free hand style curved lines instead of the normal straight borders. Borders are attached and leaves are fused to the top. I had to do it in this order, because part of the leaves fall over the border as you can see on the picture. This was done on the first part of the triptych. Tomorrow I will satinstich all the leaves on this one and continue working on the other parts.

scarf + Fabled Fibers

This is a silk scarf I got from Kathy (http://pages.prodigy.net/klukens/index.html) which I dyed yesterday. I used ProChem's Ice Blue for it and because of the nature of the scarf some areas are lighter and others are darker. I am very pleased with the result.

This morning I received an email from Ann Flaherty. She is the organizer of the Fabled Fibers show in Houston where one of my quilts is hanging. Some of the quilts are chosen for coming year's calender and some are chosen for note cards. My Princess Moonbeam will be printed on note cards. So if you want to own one or want to see more of it, here is the link: http://www.fabledfibers.com/shop.html

fabric

As promised here are some pictures of fabric I created last week. For the fabric shown above I used presist and a wrapping of cookies or chocolate. In total I used 3 layers of presist. After each layer of presist was dry I painted the fabric with procion dye in different blue/greenish colors.



This picture shows the result of 3 layers of cold wax. I started with a pink fabric on which I splattered cold wax and some brushstrokes. When the cold wax was dry, I painted the fabric with procion dye. This process was repeated 3 times.



For this fabric I placed rubber bands on the table. Positioned the fabric over them and applied thickened procion dyes using a foamroller.

More pictures will come later.

this and that

I have not written much on my blog lately. The reason for this is that I had classes with Carol Soderlund (http://www.carolsoderlund.com). During the workshops we worked on precision dyeing (I now can dye more than 1400 different colors!) and other techniques like resist, overdyeing monoprinting and shibori.
One of the other students was SarahAnn Smith (http://www.sarahannsmith.com). It was especially nice to meet Sarah as we both have a quilt in the Fabled Fibers challenge (http://www.fabledfibers.com) which can be seen in the Fall 2007 Quilt Festival in Houston.
I will post some pictures of recent dyed fabric tomorrow. I intended to do that today but I have to recharge the cells for the camera first.

blueprinting

Yesterday my friend Kelly and I played with a - for us - new type of printing technique. We used lightsensitive fabric on top of a piece of board, pinned a number of foamy fishes and milkbottle collars on it and placed the board into the sunshine. The fabric was light green before we started working on it and after half an hour it had turned into a olive kind of green. It did not look at all as the instruction manual said it should. After rinsing the fabric luckily it got the color it is supposed to have. The picture at the left shows how it looked before it was placed into the sunshine. The picture at the right shows the final result. Does it not look gorgeous? It is definately a technique/material which I will use more often in the future.
For any one who is interested in this technique, on www.blueprintsonfabric.com you can read more about it. They are also the ones who sell this special type of fabric.

this and that

No pictures today. The last couple of days I have not been able to do much with fabric or dyes. I made 2 blocks with the black and white strata's I showed on previous posting but that is all.
Further I started to experiment a bit with needlefelting. I am a member of a journalquiltgroup. In this group we make a journal quilt every month. What I am felting at the moment I want to use for coming months journal quilt. But this sample is still in an early stage.

black and white

This is the beginning of a new black and white quilt. Not much to be seen yet :-). I had so much fabric remaining after the nyb that I decided to make another quilt in these colors. For this one I am using the strippiecing technique which Louisa Smith describes in her book "Strips 'n curves". The fabric is cut into 1,5" strips which are sewed together. The template is than put onto this new created fabric and cut out. The templates are sewed together into blocks and there is the quilt. Okay, it takes a bit more time than this explanation, but in short that is how the quilt is made. The templates I will be using are a variation on the drunkards' path. Some of them will be made from black fabric, others from white and again others from a combination of both.

ccrr

With my dyeing group we are doing a twin complex cloth round robin. That is we started with a similar fabric send to two different persons who each work on it without knowing what the other group is doing. The mail has brought me the 2 ccrr's which you see on these pictures. The top one started as a violet dyed piece of fabric. The 2nd participant used cold batix wax with a stamp on it and dyed the fabric lapis. The 3rd added stamped dragon flies. When I saw this fabric it was actually complete for me but I had to add something so I diluted silver textile paint with a lot of water and brushed this over the whole piece. It now has a light sparkle all over it.

This is the other fabric which started out as a pole shibori dyed fabric. The 2nd participant in this group added a sun to the fabric using a stencil. I decided to go along with this theme and found a bamboo stencil which I used twice on this piece using green fabric paint.

digitalis quilt

This picture is a detail of the triptych I am working on. The 3 panels are now finished, that is to say the piecing and the inserts are done. The next step is to add my favourite batting (fusible Hobbs) and fabric for the back and iron everything together.
For adding the leaves of the foxgloves I will be using another technique: fusible applique. I am not yet certain whether I will raw edge them or use the standard satinstitch. There will also be a number of fused applique flowers added.
Creatively speaking this was all I did last week. I have no girl to help me with the cleaning at the moment, so I had to do some - very necessary - housecleaning myself :-(.

Seattle Streets

On one of my dyeing groups we had a swap early this year of blocks based on a pattern created by Laurie Biethan. It took a couple of months before I had time to make a quilt out of these blocks. Than I had to found a suitable way of quilting them. My first attempt was an all over quilting pattern but I was not satisfied with it so I removed it. My second attempt was to quilt in the ditch with on a number of blocks a pattern like a sheep, tree, fish, bird or something else. This time I am satisfied with it.

If you are interested in using Laurie's pattern, let me know and I will pass the message on to Laurie.

Color play

On my Surfacing group we have monthly swaps discovering new or unusual materials/techniques. The theme for one of the coming swaps is called Color Play. The idea is to make something within the same color using what ever kind of material. For this swap I made the 5 fabric postcards you see in this picture. The materials I used were: handdyed fabric, yarn, beads, paper, heated lutrador, printed transparency, brads and sheers.

Wil

additive gradation

When you dye your own fabric, you can of course use the dyepowders as they are sold by the companies. Mixing dyepowders yourself is fun and gives sometimes surprising results. This picture shown fabric on which I used a combination of G&K nickel 603 and Dharma marigold 67. The nickel is gradated with 50% water with each f8 and 7,5 cc of marigold was added to each baggy. I had expected a much more greenish fabric but instead I got these lovely colors.

landscape journal quilt

This is the journal quilt I made yesterday. On my surfacing group we had this month the theme landscape. I printed a picture on a transparency and sliced this into pieces. Three of these pieces I used for this quiltlet. The areas in between are painted with acrylic paint and seed beads are added. The transparency makes it difficult to get a clear picture of it, but I hope you can see it.

discharge

This is a photo of the discharge I did today. Some of the fabric I discharged is for a swap, but I also used did some to keep. For the fabric in this photo I used plain kitchen bleach which I rolled over bubble wrap. Placed the bubblewrap on top of the fabric and when the color started to change I soaked it into water. After this I kept the fabric for some 10 minutes in water to which I had added antichlor. I don't know yet for which project I will use this fabric, but it looks interesting.

binder covers

No picture this time :-). The last couple of days I worked on a couple of swap commitments for my dyeing group. For 1 of them I had to make a brown for which I used Dharma's rust orange and forest green. This resulted in a very pleasant deepcolored brown. The other one was just to create a new color. For this I mixed deep purple with stormy grey. They are cut and packed, ready to be swapped.
I like to make my binders more personal than simply use the ready bought type. For this reason I make a fabric cover and glue this to the binder. At the moment I am preparing 3 of these covers so that I can take them with me on my holiday. he technique I will be using on these is reverse applique. I have found some nice patterns on the internet which I enlarged to the size I want. I am now marking these on my fabric so that I only have to handstitch them when I am in the US.

fabric postcards

These are 2 of the postcards I made for the summer postcard swap with my dyeing group. For these cards I used handdyed fabric, a shell and some lutrador on which I had used my heatgun. Added some decorative quilting. Normally I send my cards naked but this time they will go into a cellophane cover as the lutrador has holes in it and not all the edged are covered with stitching I am not certain that the cards will survive the mail handling machines.

I also worked on more fabric charms and have discovered a faster way of making them. As first layer for the charms I use a sheet of felt instead of fabric and I work on both sides of the felt. This way I do not have to use interfacing in the middle. Another nice thing is when I make the charms like this I do not have to color the sides of the interfacing before stitching. Making these little inchies is very addictive :-)

fabric charms

I made some fabric charms or inchies today. For my Surfacing group we plan to do these as a Christmas swap and to find out how much time it takes I did a trial. I made these charms according to Sue Bleisweiss instructions (http://www.fibreandstitch.com/pdf/charms.pdf) and I must say it did not take much time. It took about one hour to make 20 of these litte charms. And yes, they can become very addictive :-)

digitalis quilt

Today I started working on the digitalis triptych which is the 4th assessment for my C&G course. The picture shows the separate blocks which are pinned on my design wall. This quilt will be a combination of inserts and applique. At the moment the pieces are ready to be stitched together after which I can start working on the applique. Some of the applique leaves will be made in 3d technique. And as usually all the fabrics are handdyed.