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 :-)