Gold

The Dutch sistergroup of the Challenge Quilts - De Uitdaging - has at the moment the theme 'gold'. For this challenge I decided to start with a black piece of fabric. I had no specific plans to start with, just followed what the fabric asked for.

The first start was made by cleaning my roller brush on to this fabric :-). For something else I had used antique gold textile paint and there was still some on my plate when I had finished working on that fabric. So after step one the fabric looked like this:

For step two I used my funky spiral templates with gold paintsticks. This is how it looked:

Looking better but not yet complete. I spend some time with a pair of scissors and bondaweb, fused the result to the fabric and ironed gold foil on it.

I think the fabric is now ready to get fused to the batting and backing fabric. For step 4 will be quilting through golden lutrador and zapping this. And of course quilting the other areas as well.

Pictures will follow later.

Four Seasons Quilt Swap

To say no to a quiltswap is difficult for me :-). The recent one I joined is organised by Margaret and this 5th Four Seasons Quilt Swap is a monochromatic one. My partner - whose name has to remain a secret till after swapping - likes blue and red and wants a wall quilt in honour of her favourite season winter. Size has to be between 16" and 20". This is how I started:

Each block is 4"x4". They were joined into this:

The background is finished. It is to represent a winter sky, blue with just a little bit of color as the sun is rising.

I did some googling and found pictures of frost on the window. One of these pictures I traced onto a plastic sheet protector and enlarged this to the size I needed. It is a bit difficult to see but this is the enlarged paper pattern. I copied this onto the paperside of bondaweb and fused this to a very light blue piece of fabric. I added some diluted white/silver paint to the fabric to give it a bit of a shimmer. The rest of the afternoon was filled with cutting out all these tiny pieces. But it was worth it. Here you can see the result after I fused it to the blue background:

The next step will be to fuse the top to the batting and backing fabric and to free motion quilt it. According to the rules of this swap I am not allowed to mail it before February 15 so there is lots of time for this.

A new beginning

For the Challenge group the present theme was a difficult one. It was what do you wish for the other members. I had a couple of ideas, but to visualize them was something else. Finally I decided to do it in an abstract style and this is the result. My wish is: creativity after a periode of bleakness, sunshine after darkness.
All fabrics are commercial batiks and the piece is machine quilted. Size 20"x20".

Research

No picture today. The last couple of days I have been working on my research paper which is a requirement of the c&g diploma course. Subject is the history of quilting in the Netherlands after 1800. I started working on it a couple of months, but had to wait for a book I needed. Publication date of the book was postponed a couple of times, but this week it arrived. There is only one specialist regarding this subject and her name is An Moonen. My paper only needs one more proof reading and than it is ready to be handed in.
Although I could not do any quilting because of this paper I have several ideas bubbling in my mind. For both the Challenge group and De Uitdaging I have ideas worked out. The same for the Four Seasons Quilt Swap I signed up for and also for 2 new challenges organised by Anne Copeland called: Methamorphosis and Urban Decay. All of these commitments have due dates between February 1 and March 31, 2009.

painted bondaweb

Yesterday I experimented a bit with painted bondaweb. On the paper side of the bondaweb I copied the spiral I used for one of the recent ccrr's and numbered all the pieces. The next step was to paint the fusible side with thin paint. I used a yellow and a blue/grey silk paint. When this was dry I cut out all the small pieces of the spiral - now you know why I numbered all the pieces :-) - and fused them to black fabric. This picture shows you how it looked at that stage.

The piece of fabric was big enough to cut it into two pieces of 4"x6". I used some gold metallic thread to stitch around all the individual spiral parts and did some echo quilting with black thread. This is the result:

Forest quilties

As you might recall I participated in Lenna Andrew's forest quilties swap and today the mail brought me 4 quilties from this swap.
The quiltie on the left is made by Darlene Kihne from South Dakota. What I love about this quiltie is that it has 2 layers. The top is a photo printed on extravorganza. this is attached with eyelets to a photo printed on silk. The quiltie on the right is made by Lise Saether from Norway. Lise used lovely autumn colors on it. Incorporating snippets of fabric and angelina covered with organza and free motion quilted it. The internet world is small. On Lise's blog I saw that she also participated in Kate's ALQS2 swap and the Textured Surfaces class given by Carol and Lynda.

The quiltie at the left is made by Marianne Baugher from Maryland. With the quiltie Marianne enclosed 3 little baggies with feathers, seeds and some snake skin (I think). A lovely thought. The quiltie at the right by Vicki Jones also from South Dakota. Vicki stitched yarn representing aspen trees on the quiltie. The fabric she used had photos of trees printed on it. Large sequins are the fallen leaves.

Thank you ladies for participating in this swap.

atc's and fiber cards

I have been working on some small stuff. A couple of extra atc's - for coming year's birthday swap I need more than 30. For these I used wall paper, foam, tyvek, several colors of paint and paintstiks.

And as it is the time of the year to send christmas cards. I made a couple of these:

For a few special people I make the cards myself, for all the other ones I just buy cards :-) For these cards I used commercial fabrics, angelina fibers, sequins and beads.

complex cloth

This week I have been working on 2 pieces of complex cloth. This is a swap from my surfacing group. A piece of fabric is send to another member who adds something to it. This is done in total by 4 members. The 4th returns it to the owner.
This blue fabric is now finished. It started out as a snowdyed piece of fabric. Than bubble wrap was used with white Lumiere paint. Third step was to add snowflakes with Jaquard paint. I did the final step. For these spirals I used freezer paper as a template and silver paintstiks.

The orange fabric was dyed with marigold, dusty rose and a bit stormy greay. The second step was done by stamping with Lumiere copper. I added another stamped layer to it by using bubble wrap cut into the shapes of leaves and using antique gold textile paint. One more step will be done to this fabric before it is returned to it's owner.

Ice dyeing

Ice dyeing is a variation of lwi dyeing. The soda ash soaked fabric is put into a container and put into a freezer till the next day. For these 2 pieces of fabric I started with a red dye - don't know the exact name anymore as I have thrown the empty container away - and on the left piece a bit of mustard. After batching and rinsing the pieces looked like this.

They had a bit too much white to my liking so I repeated the whole proces again. On the left piece I used again mustard, on the right piece sun yellow and this is how they looked after batching and rinsing:

Much better, don't you think?

Crunched paper

This fabric I made using crunched paper as a stamp. When you crunch a sheet of (printer)paper you get an irregular surface. Because of this irregularity the paint is not all over the stamp. The irregularity gives a lovely effect and is great for background fabric. I used different greens and blue paint on a limegreen procion mx dyed piece of fabric. I made this fabric for a swap with my surfacing group and right now the fabric is winging it's way across the pond.

Paint

Normally I like playing with paint because it means that I am working with textiles. Not this time. At the moment I am busy repainting my walls and ceilings. I really needed a different color scheme. So the coming time I will not be able to show you much creative stuff, as this painting is going slow. Anyway I can show you these pictures of before:

and during:
About 1/5 is done. When I feel I have done enough for the day, it is very easy for me, to just leave everything as it is and for instance read a book. I don't care whether the room is a mess at that time or not, I need a break:-)

award and fabric postcard

Sherryl nominated me for the Kreativ Blogger Award. Thank you Sherryl! We met first at an online class with Pamela Allen and ran into each other again in another online class. My guess is that this will happen more often in the future :-).

Okay here are the rules of the award:

1. The winner may put the logo on her blog.

2. Put a link to the person you got the award from in your blog.

3. Nominate 5 blogs.

4. Put links to the blogs.

5. Leave a message for your nominees.

I have a list of blogs I read on a regular base but I will limit myself to 5. Here they are:

- Celia, Celia makes gorgeous books and is also active in other textile arts

- Kate, Kate manages to post almost every day and is the organiser of the ALQS and the 2009 Birthday ATC swap

- Kelly, Kelly is my best friend, she is a fiber artist who loves the words 'what if'. A bit overwhelmed by live at the moment which is the reason that she does not posts much right now.

- Von, Von is a great surface designer. Check his blog for his latest creations.

- Lynda, Lynda combines paints with textiles in a wonderful way. I learned so much of her online class.

Not only did I win this award I also won this fabric postcard made by Sheila for her blogger anniversary giveaway. With this luck maybe I should buy a lottery ticket today as well :-)

books

A couple of days ago I wrote about books I was making. Well they are now both finished and here are the pictures:

For both books I used a cast paper shape on the front. The covers of the books have several layers of paint over each other. For the pages I used oil pastels and a wash of ecoline ink.

The blue book is about 8"x10", the green one is 8"x8".

journal quilt

With my surfacing group we celebrate our anniversary with a swap. Two members send some material to a third member who is to use both these things into a journal quilt. This picture shows what I got:
Kate send me some charms - I found out that we have the same mold :-) - and Ellen send me some fibers. The brown fibers are Qiviut (pronounced ki-vee-ute) and is the underfur of the Arctic Muskox. Ellen lives in Alaska which explains how she could find this stuff. The white fibers are hair shed from Dall sheep.
The charms (faces and words) had different colors as you can see. None of them really worked for me, so I painted them with a Lumiere halo gold textile paint. They made me think of old, stylized goddesses. The shapes of the goddesses I cut out of a piece of sunprinted fabric. Stitched them with metallic thread to a background. Background was quilted with spirals. Also the shapes of the goddesses asked for spirals to emphasize her belly, boobies and head. The charms were glued to the journal quilt. The fibers I used for hair. The words on the charms are: Spirit, Imagine, Dreams and 4 little charms which make the word Live. The charms also gave me the idea for the title: Goddess of Life. This is the result:

book

The last couple of days I have been working on making a fabric book. Well actually I am working on 2 books at the same time :-). For both books I am using the same techniques. Starting point is a piece of Pelmet Vilene (Timtex) both sides covered with fabric. As you can see on the pictures this layer gets quilted. I used one of my favorites designs from Dijanne's book . On the front cover I glued one of the cast paper shapes I made last week. Some molding paste was added to avoid rough edges with the cast paper.

The next steps were painting these pieces. The first layer was plain white latex paint (household emulsion). With this layer you don't need so much - more expensive - textile paints as the latex stops the soaking up of the paint by the Pelmet Vilene. In total I used 3 more layers of different colors Lumiere paint on these pieces. Each layer was diluted with water. By doing this you create depth in your layers as they get kind of transparant. You continue to see parts of the earlier layers.

As each layer needs to dry before you can add the next one it is a time consuming process. The next step - on which I can start now - is to finish the edges. Paint/dye the pages which have to go into the book and stitch everything together

ATC's

A couple of days ago I showed some samples of textured surfaced I made. On this picture you see 8 atc's I made using the same techniques. I used textured paper, tyvek, molding paste and different colors of paint/paintstiks. Kate is hosting a 2009 Birthday ATC Swap and I intend to use these for this swap. If you want to join in this swap click on the link and read the details.

color wheel + cast paper

Yesterday I made some samples of cast paper. A technique I have never used before. Here you can see some of them:

I used a tile and some texture plates I had for paintstiks to achieve the texture I wanted. What I will be doing with them I'll show you in a couple of days.

Also I dyed a rainbow color wheel. For this wheel I used 1 teaspoon of dye powder per cup of water. The colors I used were lime green, cotton candy and blue wisteria. The last one was actually too weak to compete with the other ones. Each fabric is a fat quarter and for the moment they are going into my stash.

textured surfaces

As I mentioned earlier I am taking an on-line class with Fibre in Form on textured surfaces. Here are some of the pieces I created. The 2 pictures at the top are each 8,5"x 11", the 3 here after are 4"x6".

For these samples different combinations of tyvek, cheesecloth, wallpaper and yarn have been used. The color was achieved by using different types and layers of paint. I cannot go into details about this. If you want to know more how to make these you have to sign up for the class :-).

Modern times

With my last post I showed you the quilt I made for my dyeing group. At the moment I am quilting this and will show you pictures one of the coming days.

With my surfacing group we had a comparable challenge. Last year we experimented with different techniques/materials. The challenge for this year was to incorporate 9 of them into one quilt. They were: angelina, paintstiks, metal, lutrador/tyvek, bleach, foil, fibers/yarn, silk paper and sheers. On the picture you can see the result. Background is black Kona. Size of the quilt is 20"x20" (50x50 cm). Title of the quilt is 'Modern times'. Where would we be without the internet :-)

Nested Round Robin

With my dyeing group we had a color project for this year. Every month we were given a color combination and a technique which had to be used for the nested round robin. Nested because the top stayed with the owner. On this picture you can see the last two rounds which I added to it. The blue/yellow/green one had transparency as color combination, technique was free. The last round was a analogous color harmony with paper piecing as technique. For this round I had to split the border in two as I did not have enough fabric anymore to complete the whole round in one color scheme. I have no idea which colors I used to dye the color wheel so dyeing extra fabric was no option. Total size of the top is 29"x29". Next step is to quilt it.
Traditional work is not my favourite, but it was nice to work on this one.

textured surfaces

The pictures you see here are the first steps of some of the samples I have been making for the Textured Surfaces class given by Lynda and Carol. Decorative yarn, lace, strips of torn fabric and tyvek are attached - in combination with hand embroidery stitches - to a background of fabric and Pelmet Vilene. They are now waiting for the next steps which will involve paints.

Passion

For the Bakers dozen group the present theme was Passion. It took quite a while before I got an idea which I could use, but here is the result. The background was made from woven strips, handdyed and sunprinted. The lips are made from silk fusion. Size of this quiltlet is 13"x13".

mail

I cannot show you anything creative I made, but I can show you what the mail brought me today. The picture above shows the results from the screen printing swap we did on my surfacing group. These fabrics are made by- starting top left - me, Kelly, Lynda, - and starting top right - Marijke and Kate. Aren't they great! Don't know yet for what I will use them, but they will find their way into one of my quilts.
The other picture is an atc which I received from Jacqueline. I traded this one for one of mine.

If you want to trade one, I have a couple available for trading. Just let me know.