Snowy owl is finished

Snowy owl is finished! The advantage of having a couple of days off is that you can continue working on it. I started this quilt in May. The background blue and brown was dyed and fused together. The snowy owl was painted with textile paint. My intention was to have only the outline of the shadow of the owl and the tree in which it is sitting visible. Because of the dark colors it was difficult to quilt it using artificial light. But I got the effect I wanted. Total size of this quilt is 41"x41" (105x105 cm).

Here are 2 pictures, a full one:



















Because the snowy owl was painted it meant that every wrong stitch would remain visible. I really had to be careful when I machinequilted it. And a detail one:











                                               

And yes, I have to iron the quilt to get rid of the folding lines, and I have to remove the white cat's hair. Catrien managed to sleep on it in spite of my attempts to keep her away from it.

block

When you are working on big projects, the disadvantage is that there are not many things to show. A daily update is most of the time not very interesting. So in between I work on smaller projects. One of them is the challenge for the Sky is the Limit group which is due on January 1. I will show more of this one after Christmas. Another project is the monthly color blocks. I am 6 months behind I discovered but as this project will not be swapped, not much harm is done. Here is the block for July. As you can see the color was red. All fabric is handdyed.

 

more than 1 project

As always I am working on more than 1 project, so this time no progress on the canal houses but something else. Early this summer I made 4 tops which stil needed to be quilted. All of them are big, around 36"x36" (1 square metre) and this week I started quilting one of them. With this size of quilts I am so glad that I have a longarm :-).
Here is a detail of the quilting:



 

And as the quilting is done in practically the same color as the fabric, here is another picture taken from the back:

canal houses

The last couple of days I have been working on the canal houses. Here are two pictures of two sets of houses:

Actually I have done more than the pictures shown. All houses are stitched together and squared. Size of this quilt will be 32"x94" (80x235 cm) when it is completed. Next step will be to add the binding and all the embellishments.No idea where I am going to hang this. It is the biggest quilt I ever made.

grey weather

The last couple of days the weather here was foggy and grey. Not very cheerful and not the season I like. To compensate I looked for red items in my house and found the following combined in this collage:

canal houses



 The last couple of weeks I have been busy quilting the canal houses. Here are some detail pictures of what I did.

 My choice of quilting design depends on the pattern of the fabric or what the fabric is used for. For example I have stitched bricks or wavy lines representing water.

 Sometimes - as in this sample of water - the pattern of the fabric decided how it had to be quilted:

The canal houses is a big project. At the moment I still have to quilt 3 houses. The next step will be to stitch all the different panels together into one huge quilt.

atc's

Don't pay any attention to the date of the collage, because it is not correct. Here are some atc's I made recently for swaps on AFA. For the rest I am busy finishing of a number of quilt tops. Can't really say that I have UFO's, but I am working on more than 10 quilts at the same time. Will show some detail pictures of the quilting later.