decay

For my C&G diploma course I decided on 'decay' as a theme. That means that most of the activities should have some kind of connection with decay. One of the activities in my present module was foundation paper piecing. As inspiration source I picked an old door with paint peeling everywhere. To get this effect with fabric I settled on a red overdyed with grey fabric covered with dark blue lutrador. After piecing the door I zapped the lutrador so that the more reddish areas showed up much better. It is a sample piece - size A4 (8,5"x11") so I don't know whether it will ever be made into a journal quilt or not. Anyway this is how it looks:

more leaves

I made another journalquilt with the decay theme. This time I used different layers of sheers on top of each other and satinstitched the outline of leaves on it. After that I cut the leaves apart and used my soldering iron to burn holes in it. After all, the theme is decay. The leaves are attached with transparant thread on top of a handdyed piece of fabric.

Next time however I will make some changes making these kind of leaves. I will use more scraps of sheers in between the layers and I will use Misty Fuse to keep the layers together. I had thought that with the soldering iron the different layers of sheers would stick together, but they did not.

Tempting the muse

At the moment I am taking an online class given by Laura Cater-Woods together with a couple of my dyeing friends. It is called 'Tempting the Muse'. For the first assignment we had to use a theme and explore it in 3 different ways. I picked 'decay' as theme. The size of this piece is journalsize and I used watersoluble paper on it. I placed the paper on the sandwich and stitched the main veins with freemotion zigzag. For the smaller veins in between I used straight stitching. When everything was stitched I rinsed it very briefly. This way part of the paper remained on the quiltlet and added even more to the decaying effect I was trying to get.