alphabet

And with today's picture the alphabet has reached it's end. For some characters it was a real challenge to find a technique/material to use. I am happy that my surfacing group came up with this idea and I can say that I will miss this project. It was challenging, but also gave me inspiration. And not to forget I had a blogpost available when I could not show you other projects I was working on :-).
Back to today. For the Z I decided to use my heatgun and zap zome organza. If you don't zapp to close or to long, the fabric starts bubbling and does not - yet - burn into holes. To prevent the fabric from fraying I held the edges briefly through the flame of a candle. Next step was to stitch it to the background fabric. As always size is 4"x6" (10x15 cm).
Next time you see these pictures again, will be when I am putting them all together into a quilt. I will be using a Wordle design for it.

Happy Accident

Some time ago a couple of friends and I had a complex cloth round robin. In case you are not familiair with this, it goes like this: 4 people worked on the same piece of fabric after each other. Each added a layer or changed (for instance discharge) something to it. I don't remember anymore who participated in this ccrr or who exactly did what. What I do know is that one participant emailed me in distress writing me that the fabric got afire while it was in the microwave. Well accidents can happen. After all it was not done intentionally. We decided to let the fabric continue it's route. When it came home I needed quite some time to figure out what to do with it, but here you can see the result.

Normally I put a ccrr fabric in my stash and cut it up when I need something. This one got a special treatment :-). I decided to make a whole cloth quilt out of it and added dense quilting. On these two detail pictures you can see that I used several different quilting designs.

Size of this quilt is 21"x18" (53x45 cm) and I called it 'Happy Accident". I think this is a suitable name.

journal quilt

The last journal quilt for the CQGB this year is about snow. Not really a surprise, isn't it? Background fabric is a sunprint on which I placed freezer paper snow flake cut outs. Applied white paintstik on it and let it set for a couple of days. In my stash I found a quilting design with snowflakes which I did with a white thread. As always - at least this year - the size is 6"x12" (15x30 cm). I have no idea whether the same size will be used next year.

and some more snow dyeing

Some more results of the snow dyeing I did earlier this week. All pieces are approximately half yard's pieces of fabric. I did not keep notes on all of them, but I know that the top green one is Aventurijn, the purple next to it is Dharma's plum. The blue one is a mixture of 2 different blues. Of both I had a little bit remaining in the container and I just mixed them up. One was bright blue and the other might have been peacock. The reddish to the left is also a mixture. It is probably Chinese red with nickle.

Temperature has gone up a bit and the snow is melting. Maybe this was the last dyeing I can do this winter with real snow?

snow dyeing

Having snow is not that usual here, but since Thursday the world here is white. It looks very pretty, but I can't say that I like it. The good thing is that it gives me a chance to dye with real snow - instead of having to crush ice. Here are two pieces of fabric I dyed yesterday. On both I used a high percentage of dye concentrate. I did not measure it exactly, but it is around 15%.

As I was dyeing for fun I did not record which dye powder I used for which piece of fabric. On purpose I used mixed dyes, because with them you can see the breaking down of the different colors so well. I presoaked the fabric, scrunched it and put it into a colander. On this I put as much snow as the colander could take and poured the dye mixture over it. This I put on my kitchen sink. It took about 4 hours before the snow was melted. To boost the colors I microwaved each piece of fabric for 2 minutes. I noticed if you do not do this, the colors are much paler.

alphabet

For the Y I decided to go with yarn. Some time ago I had bought a collection of different decorative yarns on Ebay and going through them I found a matching color. I cannot say that this one took a long time to create :-). I draped the yarn into the shape of the Y and zigzagged it to the black background fabric. As always size is 4"x6" (10x15 cm).

Bunbury quilt

My Bunbury quilt is finished and this is how it looks:
As you can see the compulsary fabric got a dominant place this time. The quilt is not really big - it is downstairs at the moment so I do not have the exact dimensions at hand - I am guessing that it is approximately 16" x 20". To the pink fabric I added several of my own hand dyed fabrics. Title of this quilt is: 'A brand new day'. After I have used the lint roller on it - my cats love my fabric - I can send it to Australia.

Alphabet

To find a technique or a material that starts with an X proved to be a difficult one. For a while I tought of using an old Xray - I happen to have a few of those at home - but working on a black background would make it difficult to see what was going on. So I settled on the shape of an X instead of the technique or material. The technique is plain cross-stitch, but anyway it looks like an X :-)

Bunbury quilt

The Australian Burbury Patchwork & Quilting Group has an annual show. This is one of these shows in which it is compulsary to use a specific piece of fabric. Well, most of the times those fabrics don't belong to my favorite type of fabric :-), but this year it is doable. The theme this time is 'Magic Moment'. I have to admit that I had this fabric in my studio for a couple of months before I started working on it. The finished result has to be in Australia February 22 at the latest, so I really had to start working with it. This picture shows the pink - compulsary - fabric and some of the fabric I decided to use with it.
And here are some pictures of details:

As you can see I am still working on the quilt :-). Pictures from previous shows can be seen on this link.

alphabet

I have not been very creative lately, but fortunately there is still the alphabet :-). Today's picture is the W and for this I decided to use wax. Soy wax to be precisely, as I like this more than traditional wax. To create the design I used a small tray in which chocolate biscuits had been packed. Isn't that a great excuse to buy/eat chocolate? I applied the wax with a brush to the tray and placed this on top of the fabric. By repeating it - sometimes rewaxed, sometimes not - I filled the whole piece of fabric. Added dye - mixed with soda ash - with a foam brush, let it batch, washed and ironed. The washing I did in a bucket so that I could avoid that the wax went down the drain. Next step was to cut out the shape of the W and stitch this to the black fabric. Size is 4"x6" (10 x 15 cm).