Monday, June 30, 2008

A-texere

As some of you might know I participated in the Quilten Speciaal course. We had our last meeting/lesson some months ago and we all decided that we would continue as a group. And with a group a name has to be chosen. This took quiet some time, but at last the majority decided on A-texere. The A stands for Art and texere stands for textile.
In September we will have our first meeting and to start this group we all will make a small quiltlet (20"x20") with the theme Start. On this quiltlet the color turquois has to be used. This theme has been whirling in my mind for some weeks but I could not really get an interesting idea to continue working on, but yesterday I got the idea. Like switching on a lightbulb :-). I am now making a pieced background in black/white fabric (mainly black with a little bit of white). When this is finished I will start knitting something using turquois wool and attach this onto the quilt. No pictures yet to show.
Normal knitting needles are too long, but browsing ebay I found some bamboo knitting needles which are only 7,5" long.

Sunday, June 29, 2008

blue printing

My holiday is over and it took some time to get back to 'normal' life, but hopefully I will be able to post several times a week from now on. The pictures I show you today are of the blueprinting Kelly and I did. It is a variation on sunprinting for which we used special fabric. On this site you can read more about it - and order the fabric if you are interested. Another name for this technique is cyanotype printing.
For these pictures cheesecloth was placed on top of the fabric and kept in place with pins. Unfortunately there was some wind so the cheesecloth did not stay in position, but I like the effect it gives.



And as we still had the foam leaves we also used them for some pieces. We used the different leaves we had on different pieces of fabric. If you take a close look, you will notice that the finished picture is from another leave than the picture which was taken at the beginning of the blueprinting proces :-) But you get an idea of it anyway.


The fabric we used was about a year old but the effects are still good. I like this technique only I don't know whether I will do it more often as the special treated fabric is not cheap. I know that it is possible to prepare the fabric yourself, but I do not know how much of a hassle that is.



Sunday, June 15, 2008

symposium and other things

Keeping up with a blog while being away on holiday is almost impossible. I will post more pictures when I am back home again, but for the moment this is what I have to show:

The first picture is of a sunprint for the pillowcases. I used the foam templates of the Monstera leaves for this as well. The next 2 pictures are of blueprinting. This is a variation of sunprinting, but the fabric is pretreated with chemicals and is green when you start. On this piece of fabric 2 pieces of cheesecloth were placed and it was exposed to the sun for about 15 minutes. After rinsing the fabric the blue color of the fabric shows as you can see on the picture at the right.


Between June 4th and June 10th I attended the shibori symposium at Minneapolis. I have more pictures of this, but they need to be sorted out first. On the picture at the left you can see some of the samples I made during the workshops. I have done several styples of shibori before, so the most interesting part of the workshops was when the experimenting started and we learned different variations to the techeniques, like pleating the fabric before pushing it down over the pole. The picture at the right is a stitched shibori (size about 20" x 44") dyed with indigo.
I don't think I will have time to post more the coming days. When I am back home I will have my normal 3 to 4 postings a week again.
Keeping up a blog while being on holiday is almost impossible.