Voyage

I am a member of Voyage Art Textile, an online group of art quilters which started a couple of months ago. The first year are quilts (size 10"x20") will have the theme: Where am I, Where am I at and Where am I going. This quilt is the first one I made for this group. Inspiration for it came from an - enlarged - fingerprint. As I am a dyer, all the fabrics I used are hand dyed. The background is snowdyed. Most of the time I am working on more then one project, next to having a job, so dividing my time is a must. That is the reason that I fragmented the fingerprint in a couple of squares. After the machine quilting was finished, I added paint to the blue squares. Now I have the problem to find a title for this piece.

funky trees finished

The funky trees quilt is finished:



                                     

Size turned out to be 11"x13". And as I said in my previous blog post, here is my entree for this year's SAQA auction:

Same idea, different color scheme and of course size of this one is 12"x12".

funky trees

This week lesson was about the effect colors have on each other. I presume that you all know how misleading the effect can be of a  piece of fabric on different background colors. The size of the fabrics on top is the same, but depending on the light or dark color of the background it will look bigger or smaller. For this excercise I made this quiltlet using colors in the range of greens and purples:

Size is approximately 11"x13". I have to say that I like this one so much that it will probably be my inspiration for coming year's SAQA auction.

black and white quilt tops almost finished

The last couple of days I worked on the quilting of the two black and white quilt tops. As the design has not changed I am showing you detail pictures of the back so that you can see how the quilting was done. I like to find a quilting design which goes with the fabric and you can see this especially well with the vase. The quilting lines follow the design on the fabric.

The only thing which now has to be done is to finish attaching the binding and sleeves.

black and white quilt tops

The coming four weeks I am taking an online class with Pamela Allen. And yes, I am addicted to her classes :-). This time the class is all about contrast and the first lesson was about creating a composition using a monochromatic palette. And people who know me, know that I love black and white fabrics and have rather a huge stash of them. I created two quilt tops, one starting from white fabrics and the other one starting from black fabrics. Both tops are around 12"x20". The pictures show the tops with the fabric only glued together:

At the moment I am machine quilting them. For me the fun of using commercial b/w fabrics is to fuzzy cut them in such a way, that you take as much advantage of a design as possible. The flower you see on this detail is made from small circles cut out of fabric:

 And this is the picture of the original fabric:
 

                                      

Who would have thought that such a lineair fabric could create such organic looking flowers.





pounded fabric

As I wrote in my post of January 29, I prepared a piece of fabric with the technique pounding. Setting this up does not take much time - place a piece of crunched fabric in a plastic bag and use a bristle brush to apply diluted paint over it - but to see the result you really have to be patient. The container has been on top of the radiator for a week before I could take out the fabric to iron it. But I have to say, the result is worth waiting for:

It looks like the fabric is still crunched, but it is really completely flat. The pattern just look like folding lines.