Blogger's Quilt Festival

Amy is hosting another Blogger's Quilt Festival. The idea behind it, is that you share your favorite quilt and what this one mean to you. For this Fall Festival I have chosen my Red Pebble quilt:The reason that I picked this one, is that it was the first quilt I could create in a long time without any obligations. My c&g course has been finished, I was not making this quilt for a show. Just for the pleasure of designing and quilting. Okay, this does not mean that I will not ever send it to a show, but that was not the main reason of making this quilt.

atc's

Making atc's can become very addictive, especially when you have discovered ATC's For All where there are swaps going on all the time :-). Here are pictures of 2 sets which I finished recently. Shake your Buddha was the theme for the first picture. All 3 atc's are collaged papers.

For the theme Hearts I made these 3 atc's. Materials used were paper, micron pens, metal flakes, hand dyed fabrics and eyelets.

At the moment I am still working on the atc's for the other 10 swaps I committed myself to, so expect more pictures coming days. All swaps are due for December and early January but I prefer to send them in as soon as I can. You never know how long the mail will take.

paper piecing and art journal

Thank you all for giving me advice for the paper piecing. Roughly 1/3 was in favor of the centre position , 1/3 in favor of the corner position and the remaining 1/3 said it depended on what I wanted to do with it. This left me with no other choice than taking the scientific process of numbering the positions (centre = 1, corner = 2), writing these numbers on a piece of paper, shuffle the papers and pick one with my eyes closed :-). And the winner is ....... drumroll ......: corner position. Today I intend to stitch the quilt to the canvas. Picture will follow.

Another thing I did this week was working on my art journal. I am not a great painter, but I keep practising. Every month my friend Kelly and I make 2 art journals. This month's choice for me was pomegranates. Here is a painting of 2 fruits:
And here is one of the fruit cut open:

Is it great art? No! Is it fun to do? Yes!

paper piecing

The first of my paper pieced squares is ready to be stitched onto a canvas. I have auditioned two different ways of placing it, but I cannot make up my mind which one I prefer. On the first picture the square is placed in the middle of the canvas:
In the second picture the square is at the bottom left corner. Which one to choose???

atc's

Although I am working on several paper pieced quilts, I also made some atc's this week. As there is no stitching involved with these, they are easy to make while watching a dvd. The first 3 are made for the swap Tangled up in blue:
And these are made for the Red Hat's swap:

Normally I do not give names to atc's, but these 3 asked for a name :-) From left to right they are: Mother Nature, Oh la la and What's up? All these atc's are made for AFA swaps.

new project

It might have looked like I was doing nothing, but I have been working on a new project. For you who watch the videos of Design Matters TV it might look familiair. This collage shows the paper pieced tops I have been working on.

Their design was inspired by pictures of scaffolds. I used fabrics which were dyed with only 2 colors. Don't remember anymore exactly which ones, as I dyed them more than a year ago. Each top is 10"x10" (25x25 cm). I am working on a 4th one as well.

Next step will be to sandwich them and quilt them. Hopefully I will have time for that soon.

finished

The quilt I started last week is done! If you compare this picture to the one of last week, you can see that I added more pebbles. It has been a long time since I made a quilt just for fun, but for this one I had no obligations at all, just the pleasure of designing and creating.
The black fabric is a commercial batik, the white background is raw silk and the red is hand dyed. Pebbles are shadow quilted while the white has been quilted with little circles, or to stay with the theme little pebbles. Size is 19"x19" (47,5x47,5 cm) and the title is 'One red pebble'.