It is purple

Years ago I bought this pattern at Grueber St. Cloud. Normally I do not work with patterns, but this one I really liked. Only it ended up in my studio and got neglected :-(

To be honest I had forgotten that I had it, but moving house means that you see all your stuff again. A couple of months ago I decided to start working with it. As colorscheme I decided to go with purple. A trip to SR Harris was needed to supplement my purple stash of batiks :-). Here is a picture of the first 4 blocks. Each block is 12"x12".

And here is the whole stack of 64 blocks. It took me a couple of months to get them done.

This morning I completed the first strip of 8 blocks.

Quilting is done in the ditch. The larger wedges need additional quilting, probably different type of leaves. In total I need 8 of these strips, so if I am again quiet for a long time, you know what I am doing :-))

Felt rope

I have been playing with felt. No idea how many 1" circles I cut, but the length of the rope is around 15 feet. I attached one end of it to a hook in the ceiling of my kitchen and tied the rope into a loose know. This is how it looks:

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And a close up:

I got addicted a bit, and made some smaller ones - still around 8-10 feet - in different color schemes. They will end up in front of my studio windows.

Lately

Yes, I am still alive, but I have been neglecting my blog lately. There are several projects which I have completed - and another one which is giving me a head ache to save it :-).

Here are 2 pictures of samples which I turned into pillows:

And this one is another circle quilt (12"x24"). The design is created with gun powder:

If you are interested in learning this technique, our e-book is available through this link:
https://gumroad.com/l/iLbHI

change

Last year I completed a quilt, but I was not completely happy with it. This is how it looked:

Difficult at first what bothered me, but I changed the position of the lutrador strips and now I am happy with it:

The colors in the second picture look a bit pale, but I can assure you that is a trick of the camera. 

samples

When you take workshops, quite often you end up with samples of what you did. Now the problem is, what do you do with these samples?  Keep them as just samples, throw them away, or use them in some way or other. For a couple of years they spend their time in my studio waiting till I found an idea in which I could use them. Finally I found an idea and this is what I did this week:

I ordered some pillows and made covers for them. Just simple lopsided log cabins and quilted them in a way that fitted the samples. It took 2 samples to make this cushion. Another sample is still waiting to be made into another cushion, but that will happen one of the coming weeks.

Rust

It took some time, but this week I had a handy man over who was able to drill holes in the wall. Lots of paintings/quilts still need to be hanged :-). One of the things he did was drill enough holes for my small rust canvases. Here are all 9 of them hanging behind a giant agave:

rust

Sometimes a piece of fabric on its own is pretty enough. This picture shows 7 canvasses each 4"x4"just wrapped in rusted fabric. I ordered more canvasses of this size as I intend to wrap 16 in total and hang these in a grid on one of my walls. Have to check if I have enough interesting rusted fabric otherwise I have to create some more. Simple and pretty :-)

circles

My studio is not yet arranged as I want it, but there was space enough to start creating again :-). I do not remember anymore how I made this background, but I used bubblewrap to discharge the small circles. It needed a bit more, so yesterday I grapped some of my small bottles of Lumiere paint and started drawing circles on it. Now the fabric looks like this:

I think it is ready to sandwich it and start quilting.

Book is published!

I have not blogged for several months, and there were a multitude of reasons for that. One of them was that I did not want to talk about the book before it was finished. Finally I can reveal this secret :-)
Together with my friend Kelly L. Hendrickson we wrote an e-book about a new fabric surface design technique using gunpowder. Yes, you read this correctly: gunpowder! If you are interested, here is the link where you can buy it: https://gumroad.com/products/iLbHI.

  I am linking this post to Nina-Marie's Off the Wall Friday.  

Malachite detail

Here is a detail photo of the quilt I am working on now. The fusing, quilting and facing has been done so now it is time for the beads. This will take quite some time as I intend to stitch on lots and lots of seed beads.

Gold vein

And here is my 2nd quilt for the theme Treasures. This time my inspiration came from a gold vein. No hand dyed fabrics this time, but all commercial ones. Size is 17"x24".

Turquoise

For Voyage this year's theme is Treasures. It took me quite some time before I found an interesting take on this theme, but finally I settles for precious stones and metal. Here is the first quilt I made, called Turquoise:

I used my own hand dyed fabrics for this, covered with a layer of zapped lutrador. Size is 17"x24". I am linking this post to Nina-Marie's Off the Wall Friday blog. Take a look there to see what other artist did.

eco dyeing

In the 70ties I dyed my own hand spun wool with plants, but since then I have not done any eco dyeing till this week. For these 4 bundles I used pieces of copper wire and sticks of black walnut to wrap the fabric around. Placed leaves and flowers on the fabric, rolled it and and wrapped everything with cotton thread. I did this while I was still in the US. Packed these bundles into my suitcase and cooked everything yesterday with some iron sulfate.  This morning I took the bundles out off the cooking pan and this is how they looked: 

After rinsing and ironing the fabric looks like this:

Some prints are interesting, others not so. My guess is that I used too many layers of leaves/flowers. Some leaves/flowers were sumak, black walnut, astilbe, clover, geranium and lily. Aiming for better result next time.

New quilt

It does not look interesting yet, but this is the background for a new quilt I started. For Voyage the theme this year is treasures. This does not look like a treasure yet, but that will come. Size will be 17"x24". Now it is time to start quilting it.

Stamps and stamping

This month I am talking about stamps and stamping on the Fire blog. Not using 'official' stamps, but stuff you can get from your supermarket, dollarstore, DIY shops or trash. Check out the link, 3 posts per week.

A long walk home

For one of my online groups the theme was 'A long walk home'. I took me some time to find an idea fitting for this theme, but during one of those sleepless nights I found it. Remember MASH? In the centre of their camp they had a sign post with the names of cities which were important to them. This is my interpretation for this theme:

Background fabric is a drop cloth, all the other fabrics used are my own hand dyed ones.

Spring

It is still a bit chilly here (around 50 degrees F), but the blossom trees are in full spring glory:

title

Thanks for the suggestions. For this one I will go with Dancing Circles. The other suggestion - Ripples - I will keep for another circle quilt. No doubt there will be many more in this series :-)

Embroidered circles

And this is how the embroidery turned out:

To be honest, not an improvement. So while I was watching a movie, I ripped the embroidery stitches out. That means that the quilt is now completed. Only I have to find a title. I am not in favor of numbering my circle quilts, but I have to say, it is easier than coming up with titles :-). Any suggestions?

Circles

Katrien delayed my quilting, but finally I completed it. This is how my latest circle quilt looks like now:

I intend to do some more hand stitching on it, so that the brown circles stand out a bit more.