getting older

Neither of us want to admit it, but one of the side effects of getting older, is that our body changes as well. Let's say gravity has more effect on it :-). This idea was the inspiration of this quilt (10"x20"). I used turqoise dyed rusted fabric for it. For the filling of the top parts I used an eco felt. It was the first time I used it and although I like the idea behind it - it is made from recycled plastic bottles - it was terrible to stitch through. The needle gummed up all the time, and the thread broke so many times that I lost counting. After a lot of struggling and saying lots of words I won't repeat here, it got finished. Title is 'Sagging boobies'.

SAQA auction

As every year SAQA has their annual auction in September. A couple of months ago I send in my quilt for this auction. But if you want to bid on it, you won't find it on their auction pages.

In total 394 quilts have been donated. A special group of 106 will be sold in the SAQA booth at International Quilt Festival - Houston. Warren and Nancy Brakensiek selected the works for the SAQA Houston Auction Sale. And my quilt is one of those selected :-))). When I read this on the site it was a wonderful surprise and I feel so honored.

The IQF-Houston SAQA 2012 Benefit Auction Sale will begin on Wednesday, October 31st during the Preview Night from 7:00-10:00 PM Central Time and conclude on Sunday, November 4th at 4:00 PM Central. This is an in-person cash-and-carry purchase only. If you would like to purchase a specific piece and you cannot attend the IQF-Houston show, you are encouraged to find someone to make the purchase for you.

The first section of the online auction starts on September 10. Be certain that you check out these quilts. There are some great pieces available. Now I only hope that they are available, when I place my bids :-)

black coconuts

For my OCA course I had to make a design based on a sketch. This is not my usual way of designing, but the one I did for this course was one which I really liked. Enough to make a quilt out of it :-). I like black and white fabric so I went for these. The background is a rough white linen while the black shapes are made from smooth Kona fabric. You see, not only a contrast in color, but also in texture and in shapes.

The original title was supposed to be 'Opposites', but when my friend's granddaughter walked into the studio and saw this quilt she called it 'Black coconuts'. To be honest I liked this title much more than the original, so that is what it is called now :-).

pounded fabric

Creating pounded fabric is something I don't do often enough. Why I cannot really say, as I love the result and besides that it is a very easy technique. Any left over paint can be used for it. Just dilute it with water and use a bristle brush to apply this to the wet scrunched fabric. Place the fabric into a plastic bag before you start doing this, otherwise it will become messy. The hardest part comes next: leave the bag alone in a warm place for a week or longer. During this time the paint will creep up into the folds and create this gorgeous effect:

Experiment

There are many ways to create marks and shapes onto fabric or paper and most of them I have tried, but today my friend and I used a complete new material: gun powder.

Last year at Art-a-whirl there was an artist who sold panels made using gun powder. A Google search lead to a YouTube video from a Chinese artist who used gun powder as well. Sorry, both names have escaped me. These were the only sources we could find. It is a material I have no idea whether I could find it in the Netherlands, but at the moment I am in the US and here it is easily available.

If you want to try this experiment as well, be careful! Make certain that you have an open space, a bucket of water nearby and no kids or pets close by.

We wanted to experiment both on paper and on fabric. Not knowing whether the effects could be dyed later, we used both white and dyed fabric. As mask we used leaves. The first step was to place a counter top on the driveway, taped some fabric and paper onto it and positioned the leaves. It was rather windy so this was a challenge. Some tape had to be used to keep the leaves where we wanted them.

 

After that it was time to sprinkle the gun powder. No idea how much had to be used, we tried with just a little bit. Well that was not enough. On the next picture you can see on the yellow fabric that quite a lot of gun powder was needed.

 Placing a layer of fabric on top - or some paper - gave no additional prints. We only tried this once.  All this was covered with an opened card board box. Next step was to set the gun powder a fire. The next picture show what happens when you don't use enough gun powder: not much, only some smoke.

 This picture however showed how the next attempt went:

 The flames really startled me, so I missed to take the picture of the covered layers, I only got the flames.

When the card board box was removed this was how the paper and fabric looked like. And here are two pictures of results which really turned out nicely. The first picture is of a piece of fabric, the second one of a piece of paper.