Blog anniversary and giveaway

Most bloggers choose a round figure like the 100 post or the actual year completed to celebrate their blog anniversary. I decided to use this funky number. This post is my 333rd post since I started blogging. Much more fun to celebrate it this way:-).
To celebrate it I have a giveaway. One of my snowdyed pieces of fabric (1/2 yard). How do you enter this giveaway? Leave a comment on this post and post about this giveaway on your blog (if you have one). This contest ends on Saturday March 6 at 12 o'clock local time. Be certain that if you are the winner, I can reach you by email. I will pick a winner at random. No matter where you live, I'll post the fabric to you.
No pictures with this post. My next one will have a picture again.

No neighbours

A couple of weeks ago I showed some samples of trees I made. They were samples on journal size fabric and I will make more of them. But for this quilt I used some of those ideas in a bigger scale. Size of this quilt is 26"x20" (65x50 cm). All fabrics used are commercial batiks. Actually batiks and b/w fabric are the only commercial fabrics I buy. The leaves of the trees at the left are snippets fused down with Misty Fuse and covered with black netting. If only my garden was this big:-). Because of this thought I came up with the title 'No neighbours'.

snow and ice

Two different techniques, but they are related. For the piece on the left side I used snow on top of soda soaked fabric (not frozen), the piece on the right was soda soaked and frozen before I poured on the dye. As you can see when the fabric is frozen, you get a much more crystalline pattern.


Here are two other pieces of fabric on which I used the same techniques.

It is also possible to put snow on top of frozen soda soaked fabric. I cannot say how the result is when you do it like that, as I have not tried that. Here the snow is now gone, so hopefully I will not have the chance to try this one out before December :-)

Longing for summer

A couple of days ago I showed you the start of my journal quilt for this month. It started as one of the samples I made for Pamela Allen's online class. I had to change the size a bit as the CQGB uses 7"x10" for the journal quilts of this year
For this journal quilt I used my own hand dyed fabrics, as technique my favorite raw edge applique. On this picture you can see a detail:

I am so fed up with this winter and all the snow that it brought us, that I called it: 'Longing for summer'.

more snowdyeing

In our average winter we have maybe 5 days of snow during the winter, especially the last few had very little snow. This winter is the exception. Since December 40 days of snow have been counted. What else can you do in a winter like that but snow dyeing :-). Here are pictures of the two halfyard pieces I did this week. I used fuchsia, sage and pearl grey as colors.

trees

Many of us will have used trees in their work. I am guessing that most of the time those trees looked like real life trees. But would it not be great fun to play around a bit? Here are 3 examples of fantasy trees:

The size is 8"x10" (20x27 cm) each. Background is snow dyed fabric. The trees are made from commercial batiks and/or hand dyed fabric.
Now I am in doubt. Shall I make 3 separate journal quilts? Or shall I continue in making more fantasy trees and add them all into one big quilt?

color palette

Three pictures of quilt tops which appears to be completely different, but they have something in common. This excercise started with a painting by Ton Schulten Chapelfield as inspiration source. I picked a number of my handdyed fabrics and created this top:


It is not yet stitched. The pieces of fabric are glued onto a background. Size is 10"x10" (25x25 cm). Next step was to use the same color palette and create a different design using different proportions and a different composition. Well certainly this flower is different. I used more blue and green in it and less red/pink/purple colors.

Size of this is 8"x10" (20x25 cm). This might turn into my journal quilt for this month.
As I said earlier on, I made three quilttops the last couple of days. For the third one, I again used the same color palette, but added some other green and red/orange colors. And again a different composition:

At the moment this quilttop is glued and fused. Stitching and quilting will follow later. Size of this one is 20"x20" (50x50 cm). Isn't it amazing how different the same fabrics can look, depending on the quantity and how you place them. After three different compositions I stopped using this color palette, but no doubt many more compositions can be made from this.

final assessment quilt

I started working on my final assessment quilt for the c&g diploma course. The background will be made from traditional blocks. I will be using the complete Storm at Sea block, mixed with parts of this block. The picture shows some of the blocks hanging on my design wall.
The size of the quilt will be 60"x60" (150x150 cm) so the coming time I will be making lots and lots of these blocks. The complete block will be 10"x10", the blocks in between eiter 5"x5" or 2,5"x5".

Fractured flower

The fractured flower parts have come home :-). For this swap a picture was divided into 4 parts. Each participants made all 4 parts and sent them to the swaphostess. She mixed the pieces and mailed each of us a set containing one of our own pieces and 3 made by the other participants. The parts you see in this picture were made by Kelly, Gena, Karen and me. The next step for me is to stitch the parts together and quilt/embellish it. This might take some time as I am rather busy at the moment.