books

A couple of days ago I wrote about books I was making. Well they are now both finished and here are the pictures:

For both books I used a cast paper shape on the front. The covers of the books have several layers of paint over each other. For the pages I used oil pastels and a wash of ecoline ink.

The blue book is about 8"x10", the green one is 8"x8".

journal quilt

With my surfacing group we celebrate our anniversary with a swap. Two members send some material to a third member who is to use both these things into a journal quilt. This picture shows what I got:
Kate send me some charms - I found out that we have the same mold :-) - and Ellen send me some fibers. The brown fibers are Qiviut (pronounced ki-vee-ute) and is the underfur of the Arctic Muskox. Ellen lives in Alaska which explains how she could find this stuff. The white fibers are hair shed from Dall sheep.
The charms (faces and words) had different colors as you can see. None of them really worked for me, so I painted them with a Lumiere halo gold textile paint. They made me think of old, stylized goddesses. The shapes of the goddesses I cut out of a piece of sunprinted fabric. Stitched them with metallic thread to a background. Background was quilted with spirals. Also the shapes of the goddesses asked for spirals to emphasize her belly, boobies and head. The charms were glued to the journal quilt. The fibers I used for hair. The words on the charms are: Spirit, Imagine, Dreams and 4 little charms which make the word Live. The charms also gave me the idea for the title: Goddess of Life. This is the result:

book

The last couple of days I have been working on making a fabric book. Well actually I am working on 2 books at the same time :-). For both books I am using the same techniques. Starting point is a piece of Pelmet Vilene (Timtex) both sides covered with fabric. As you can see on the pictures this layer gets quilted. I used one of my favorites designs from Dijanne's book . On the front cover I glued one of the cast paper shapes I made last week. Some molding paste was added to avoid rough edges with the cast paper.

The next steps were painting these pieces. The first layer was plain white latex paint (household emulsion). With this layer you don't need so much - more expensive - textile paints as the latex stops the soaking up of the paint by the Pelmet Vilene. In total I used 3 more layers of different colors Lumiere paint on these pieces. Each layer was diluted with water. By doing this you create depth in your layers as they get kind of transparant. You continue to see parts of the earlier layers.

As each layer needs to dry before you can add the next one it is a time consuming process. The next step - on which I can start now - is to finish the edges. Paint/dye the pages which have to go into the book and stitch everything together

ATC's

A couple of days ago I showed some samples of textured surfaced I made. On this picture you see 8 atc's I made using the same techniques. I used textured paper, tyvek, molding paste and different colors of paint/paintstiks. Kate is hosting a 2009 Birthday ATC Swap and I intend to use these for this swap. If you want to join in this swap click on the link and read the details.

color wheel + cast paper

Yesterday I made some samples of cast paper. A technique I have never used before. Here you can see some of them:

I used a tile and some texture plates I had for paintstiks to achieve the texture I wanted. What I will be doing with them I'll show you in a couple of days.

Also I dyed a rainbow color wheel. For this wheel I used 1 teaspoon of dye powder per cup of water. The colors I used were lime green, cotton candy and blue wisteria. The last one was actually too weak to compete with the other ones. Each fabric is a fat quarter and for the moment they are going into my stash.

textured surfaces

As I mentioned earlier I am taking an on-line class with Fibre in Form on textured surfaces. Here are some of the pieces I created. The 2 pictures at the top are each 8,5"x 11", the 3 here after are 4"x6".

For these samples different combinations of tyvek, cheesecloth, wallpaper and yarn have been used. The color was achieved by using different types and layers of paint. I cannot go into details about this. If you want to know more how to make these you have to sign up for the class :-).

Modern times

With my last post I showed you the quilt I made for my dyeing group. At the moment I am quilting this and will show you pictures one of the coming days.

With my surfacing group we had a comparable challenge. Last year we experimented with different techniques/materials. The challenge for this year was to incorporate 9 of them into one quilt. They were: angelina, paintstiks, metal, lutrador/tyvek, bleach, foil, fibers/yarn, silk paper and sheers. On the picture you can see the result. Background is black Kona. Size of the quilt is 20"x20" (50x50 cm). Title of the quilt is 'Modern times'. Where would we be without the internet :-)