nested round robin

Yesterday I was writing a list of the quilt commitments I have for the coming months and I ended up with a total of 8. That is the reason that you will see a range of different quilts as I am working on several at the same time.
This is a picture of the nested round robin we are doing with my dyeing group. Nested in this case means that the top does not leave my house. Every month we get a notice saying the colors which have to be used and the technique. Because of my vacation I still had to do June so I worked on both months tasks today. For the June row we had to use triangles in monochromatic colors while white/grey/black could be added. I had only dyed one medium value colorwheel and as I had no idea what dye powders I had used, I had to change the rules a bit. As color for the row I picked black and I fused random cut triangles on top of it. For July the challenge was to use a twisted ribbon with split complementary colors. I could have chosen to do a traditional twisted ribbon block, but I like to work more freestyle so that was not an option for me. I cut two ribbons out of fabric and fused them on top of the background fabric. On purpose I placed this twisted ribbon in only one corner. Size of the quilt till now is 18"x18".

Start + Minnesota quilt

As I mentioned in my previous posting I started working on my Start quiltlet. The background is now pieced as you can see in this picture. The quilt is now a sandwich (I used my favourite Fusible Hobbs) and is ready to be quilted.

When I was in Minnesota my friend Kelly suggested that we should make a quilt to memorate this holiday. And as we are both always in for a challenge we decided that we would start with one piece, divide this into two and both of us would continue working on it after the holiday. The pictures you see here are the beginning steps. Background fabric is a piece of fabric which we rust dyed. The Starbuck symbol (we both love their coffee and frappucino) was made from a darkgreen batik - I bought lots of batiks when I was there - , covered with gauze and fused with Misty Fuse to the background fabric.


The next step was a drastic one :-). With a rotary cutter Kelly divided the quilt into two pieces and this is how the quilt looks now. We both have samples of the different types of fabric dyeing/painting we did which will be added and some other additions. Size of the quilt before cutting was approximately 16"x16". How big the results will be is not yet known, but I will keep you posted.

A-texere

As some of you might know I participated in the Quilten Speciaal course. We had our last meeting/lesson some months ago and we all decided that we would continue as a group. And with a group a name has to be chosen. This took quiet some time, but at last the majority decided on A-texere. The A stands for Art and texere stands for textile.
In September we will have our first meeting and to start this group we all will make a small quiltlet (20"x20") with the theme Start. On this quiltlet the color turquois has to be used. This theme has been whirling in my mind for some weeks but I could not really get an interesting idea to continue working on, but yesterday I got the idea. Like switching on a lightbulb :-). I am now making a pieced background in black/white fabric (mainly black with a little bit of white). When this is finished I will start knitting something using turquois wool and attach this onto the quilt. No pictures yet to show.
Normal knitting needles are too long, but browsing ebay I found some bamboo knitting needles which are only 7,5" long.

blue printing

My holiday is over and it took some time to get back to 'normal' life, but hopefully I will be able to post several times a week from now on. The pictures I show you today are of the blueprinting Kelly and I did. It is a variation on sunprinting for which we used special fabric. On this site you can read more about it - and order the fabric if you are interested. Another name for this technique is cyanotype printing.
For these pictures cheesecloth was placed on top of the fabric and kept in place with pins. Unfortunately there was some wind so the cheesecloth did not stay in position, but I like the effect it gives.

And as we still had the foam leaves we also used them for some pieces. We used the different leaves we had on different pieces of fabric. If you take a close look, you will notice that the finished picture is from another leave than the picture which was taken at the beginning of the blueprinting proces :-) But you get an idea of it anyway.

The fabric we used was about a year old but the effects are still good. I like this technique only I don't know whether I will do it more often as the special treated fabric is not cheap. I know that it is possible to prepare the fabric yourself, but I do not know how much of a hassle that is.

symposium and other things

Keeping up with a blog while being away on holiday is almost impossible. I will post more pictures when I am back home again, but for the moment this is what I have to show:

The first picture is of a sunprint for the pillowcases. I used the foam templates of the Monstera leaves for this as well. The next 2 pictures are of blueprinting. This is a variation of sunprinting, but the fabric is pretreated with chemicals and is green when you start. On this piece of fabric 2 pieces of cheesecloth were placed and it was exposed to the sun for about 15 minutes. After rinsing the fabric the blue color of the fabric shows as you can see on the picture at the right.

Between June 4th and June 10th I attended the shibori symposium at Minneapolis. I have more pictures of this, but they need to be sorted out first. On the picture at the left you can see some of the samples I made during the workshops. I have done several styples of shibori before, so the most interesting part of the workshops was when the experimenting started and we learned different variations to the techeniques, like pleating the fabric before pushing it down over the pole. The picture at the right is a stitched shibori (size about 20" x 44") dyed with indigo.

I don't think I will have time to post more the coming days. When I am back home I will have my normal 3 to 4 postings a week again.

Keeping up a blog while being on holiday is almost impossible.

catching up

I have not had time to blog this week so this post will be a long one. I am at the moment at my friend's place in Minnesota and we are having so much fun. Of course we had to do shopping - I think I bought around 30 yards of batik fabric and lots of other goodies at JoAnn's and Michaels. But we also played in Kelly's studio.
One of the things we did was sunprinting a really big piece of fabric. I want to make a cover for my duvet with different prints on both sides. In total this piece is 12 yards. On the internet I found some pictures of the Monstera Deliciosa leave of which I made a line drawing. This was enlarged to 25", 30" and 35". The next step was to copy these enlarged prints to the thin foam they sell at the kids craft department at JoAnn's to be used as templates. The fabric was wetted and we used 3 different Setacolor transparent paints on them (pernod green, emerald and cobalt blue). The big pieces of fabric were carried out to the drive way, the templates placed on them with pebbles on top of them to prevent them from blowing away and some rice was sprinkled on top as well. The other piece was crunched a bit and salt was sprinkled.
The pictures here show the different steps. Because of the size of fabric it is not possible to do this on your own. I love how it turned out.






This week we had 2 rainy days which called for some experimenting. Opposite to sunprinting we did rainprinting. On presoaked fabric some Procion dyepowder was sprinkled and the fabric was left outside in the rain. The fabric turned out nice, but not interesting enough to use this technique more often. At least not with only one color of dye powder, multiple colors might be interested.


Another thing we did was use bleach on black Kona. This picture shows the result of bleach

sprayed over cheesecloth which was placed on top of black Kona. I love the result. This piece will probably turn into a wholecloth quilt, but I also bleached a 2,5 yard piece of black Kona to make a jacket.

The following 3 pictures are of works in progress. First picture is of a piece of fabric placed on shaving cream. This is for a swap of our dyeing group. At the moment this fabric is in the washer. I will post pictures when it is done.

The last 2 pictures show several pieces of fabric around rusted metal. We wrapped the fabric around these pieces and sprayed them with vinegar. This is how they look like the next day. I added some more vinegar today. Hopefully they are ready tomorrow.

not much to show

No pictures today. The last couple of days my time was filled with all kind of errands so I did not have much time to be creative.
Some time ago I showed pictures of the Sun quiltlet I am making for Baker's Dozen. At first I thought I would add either French knots or seed beeds to it, but I decided to leave it like it is now. The sparkling effect this piece now has because of the Angelina, was reduced when I tried the beeds or knots on it. The only thing I did on it, was to add the binding. But that is hardly worth showing a new picture :-)