new project

I started a new project this weekend for which I auditioned the green batiks I have. As you can see, my stash is rather large:

Out of this stash I selected the fabric I wanted and created this background for it:

The fabric was torn into strips and they were placed partly over each other so that the whole area was covered. Size of the quilt is around 30"x30". I have not measured it, so this figure is a bit of guesswork. My way of doing things might be a bit unusual, as I quilt the background before I start adding things to the background. This picture shows a detail of the quilting:

Alphabet

For the K I used knotted resist as a technique. A narrow piece of fabric was the starting point. This I tied into a knot and overdyed it. Result was like this:

To do this technique on say an fq is rather akward. Narrow pieces are much easier to knot.
Out of this piece of fabric I cut the shape of the K, fused it to the black background fabric and stitched it. As you can see on the picture, one of my cats slept on it and left some hair behind.

During the whole year I am showing you once every two weeks a picture of a character. Actually I finished the last one this week, but you have to be patient. For the final lay-out I Intend to use Wordle. I will play a bit and see what interesting lay-out comes up.

back on line - new workshop

I had some serious computer problems and had no access to internet. So glad that everything is working again. Because of this my announcement is a bit late. Friday next week (May 29th) I will start giving an online 2-week workshop on Arashi (pole) dyeing. In this workshop I will teach you the basic Arashi and 11 variations to it. TIf you are interested in taking this workshop, leave me a comment and I will get back to you.

Alphabet

It is time for the next picture of the alphabet. For the 'J' I worked with a piece of cheap jewellery from a dollar store. I cut it into the length I needed it and glued it to the fabric. Simple but effective.

Lady in blue

The Challenge Quilts group had a theme: the last book you read. Well, it was not the last one, but I read the book not so long ago :-). My choice fell on the book Lady in Blue by Javier Sierra. The story is about a nun in the 17th century who lives in Spain but was also seen in New Mexico. This travel was done by way of bilocation: according to some religions a body can be present in two different places at the same time. I did not want to copy this theme exactly, but I was more interested in the title itself. Background was made of a twice icedyed piece of fabric. The shape of the women was made from a shibori piece of fabric. On purpose I made the lady in a kind of ancient goddess shape. As the story tells that she is in two places at the same time, she is twice on the quilt. Size of this quilt is 20"x20".

For quilting design I decided on an idea of a circuit board, all rectangulars and circles. To me this represents the way the mind works. Here is a detail picture:

unusual dyeing

Caustic soda, strong tea, iron sulphate. Not exactly the materials you think of when you think of fabric dyeing. A couple of months I took a workshop with Lynda Monk (Purple Missus) and in one of the lessons this technique was explained. I did not want to use this stuff indoors so I had to wait for a day with glorious sunshine and nice temperatures. And of course have some spare time on that day as well . Well this weekend I could do this. I used 2 buckets, each one for the chemicals, put on my safety gloves and dipped the fabric into one solution, let it drip and repeated the process with the onther solution. On this picture you see the fabric while it is still wet:

The next day after ironing the fabric looked like this:

In total I dyed some 8 fq's using this technique. On some of them I will do some more experimenting with discharge paste, maybe bleach, maybe some stamping. There are lots of options I have in my mind.

alqs3

Yesterday I showed you pictures of the quilt I am making for ALQS3. Well today I continued working on it and now it is finished. Here are the pictures of it:

Size is 18"x22,5". Title is 'Three flowers in a vase'. Who could have guessed .

alqs3

Kate is organising another ALQS. Round 3 is a bit different than the previous ones. One the ALQS blog you can read more about the details. But anyway I am participating. This time with 2 quilts. One was made for a previous Quiltswap which was cancelled. Luckily for me the size was okay for ALQS3. The other one is a new quilt. Here are some pictures of what I have done till now. First I started with auditioning several black and white fabrics for the background. The one at the right was a long strip folded irregularly and ironed to fusible webbing. The other white and the black one were cut in different shapes pieced and placed all over each other in a random way.

Next step was to go through my batiks. I found a grey/blue one out of which I made the table and a purple one which was perfect for a vase. All shapes were cut without templates. Temporarily glued to the background with a glue stick. When I liked the lay out I machine quilted it, starting with the background. Next was the table. Before I could quilt the vase I first had to make stems and put them into the vase like this:

It is a bit difficult to see, but there are 2 stems. The right side was a bit dark so I made a couple of circles and placed them there. The order in which I make a quilt may sound a bit strange. But after the quilting was done I continued with adding the bindings and part of the sleeve. Stay tuned for the finishing of this quilt.

Colorful Amsterdam

For the Dutch sistergroup of the Challenge Quilts the present theme was: Treasure of a city / Wonderful city (it can be translated into both). Not an easy one for me as I am not very fond of cities. I prefer the rural areas more. Well after some thinking I ended up with Amsterdam. It is the city I work in - I commute 4 days a week to it. Not for the traditional tourist attractions, but I decided to pick this town as it is very multi-cultural. Since 2007 it is leading the list of cities in which the most nationalities are present (177). As comparison New York has (only) 150. I could have chosen 177 different pieces of fabric, but that would be very time consuming. As usual I am working on several projects at the same time. Instead of that I decided to pick a different batik for every district of Amsterdam. First I cut out every template from freezer paper, ironed this to the front of the fabric and ironed Misty Fuse to the other side of the fabric. When I had placed them on my fabric it looked like this:

The batiks were picked at random. Would it still look good when the freezer paper was removed??? Well luckily I was not disappointed. The final result looks like this:

The districts are stitched to the background using raw edge applique. As quilting design I used a simple line following the shape of the districts.