one color

For the Dutch challenge group the present theme was 'all in one color'. Inspiration for my quilt came from a painting by the Russian/French painter Kandinsky and to be exact by his oilpainting Farbstudie Quadrate 1913 . Okay because of the theme my quilt has less colors than Kandinsky's work. And I found it easier to make smaller circles. This quilt is 20"x20" and to divide that by 5 is easy to do :-).
This time I did not use any handdyed fabric in it, but only batiks and other commercial fabric from my stash.

Sold!

For the last 2 years two of my quilt have been travelling with Gudrun Heinz's How Amazing exposition through Germany and Switzerland. This exposition is over now and Gudrun sent me an email telling me that both pieces have been sold. Here are the pictures of the quiltlets:

Size of each is 8"x8"(20x20 cm). I used commercial fabric, transparency sheet, beads, cardstock and zapped lutrador on them.

art cloth

Some time ago I showed my 5 yard piece of fabric wrapped with rubber bands. After the discharge I wanted to apply different colors of dye to it. I knew that doing this on such a big piece of fabric would be challenging and yes it was, even more challenging than I had expected. I just could not see which portion got enough dye and which one did not. This is how the fabric looked after the batching, rinsing and washing:
Not the effect I was hoping for. The turquoise discharged very subtle, but the applied dye had not penetrated deep enough. This meant overdyeing. Last Sunday I scraped the snow of my roof terrace. The snow in my garden was gone, but the terrace faces north and because of that still had some snow. It was enough to fill the container with the crunched cloth. Poured two dye mixture over it -both were green one light, one darker - and let it batch. After the batching, rinsing and washing the fabric now looks like this:

Better than it was. It is now waiting for the next step.

Ice dyeing

For a new project - my final assessment for the c&g diploma course - I need a lot of fabric. The quilt has to be at least 60"x60" (150x150 cm). The brief has been written and the starting design has been made. Besides dyeing fabric I have to make some samples to find out what is the best technique for what I want to create. For the dyeing of today I used mainly turquoise. A bit of fuchsia and sun yellow was added. This varied between 0,01 and 0,1 gram compared to 7 gram of turquoise. You can see the subtle color differences on the pictures below:

For technique I used ice dyeing. Put a soda soaked piece of fabric in a container into your freezer. Take it out the next day and pour the dye mixture over it and let it batch. After the batching I put it into the microwave just to give it a boost. As simple as that. And you can do it the whole year through no matter what kind of weather you have :-)

Going banana's?

No I have not gone banana's, it was a rethorical question :-). For my C&G course I had to make a 3d object inspired by fruit or seed pods. Well I must admit I found this a very difficult assessment. For some reason it got stuck in my mind that I had to reproduce a fruit or seed pod. Luckily this was not the case, so I could let my imagination go wild. The inside of the banana peel is made from cotton, black Misty Fuse and cheesecloth. The parts are connected with zippers. On the outside I crunched cheesecloth, added some hand stitching and several layers of acrylic paint. By using thin layers of different colors, the colors shimmer through. And as a finishing touch I added beaded tassels. Making these was really a challenge as one of my cats was sitting next to me and was very interested in what I was doing.

journal quilt

This year the CQGB group has again a journal quilt project. The size is a bit different than last year: 7"x10", only portrait format allowed. I decided to join them for this year too. For January my journal quilt is based on snow - not really a surprise, is it? - and to be more specific birdprints in the snow. For the last 3 weeks we have had snow and I see those foot prints every day. Background is made from white fabric, black Misty Fuse and a layer of cheese cloth. This I fused together and free motion quilted it with a snow flake design. The stamp of the foot prints I made from sticky foam and I used Setacolor to print with. Title of this quilt is: Bird was here.

snow dyeing

Like so many other people I have been taking advantage of the snow we have here. No need now to use my snow cone machine :-). Here are 3 samples of what I dyed today. I used two variations of this technique. For the top two pictures I used a container instead of my usual colander. There was no way that the melting snow could get away. The results surprised me a bit, I had thought that there would be more even colored fabric as the dye/melted snow mixture would have been into contact with the fabric for a longer period.

The third piece was done using a colander. For these 1/5 yard pieces I used Sage, Musk Melon and Pearl Grey.

Art cloth

Not much to show after a week of silence :-). I committed myself to an art cloth challenge on one of my yahoo groups. It is due in August so I have enough time to work on it. And that time I will need as this piece of fabric is 5 yards (4,5 meter) long. For the first step I dyed it using a mixture of turquoise, sun yellow and fuchsia. Color 316 to be exact for the readers who have taken Carol Soderlund's class. Normally I rinse and wash by hand, but this time I used my frontloader.
For the next step I am going to discharge. On the picture you can see that I have tied lots and lots of rubber bands around the fabric. If I only knew where I had put my anti-chlor.

Once more the alphabet

It is not a very good picture, but it gives you an idea what I have been doing with all my separate alphabet pieces. I used Wordle to give me some idea which lay-out I wanted to use. All the blocks are stitched together. Probably I'll add a black block border around it, just like the one you see at the bottom.

A new year

A new year has started. I hope it brings you all you wish in terms of health, creativity, jobs, love, you name it. For me I don't make new year resolutions as I feel you can start them any moment you want. Let's hope that the year will be a creative one to us all.
The new year will bring me a blogaversary in one of the coming months. I have to start thinking about a give-away :-). More about that in a later post.
What I can show you today is this little quilt, size 12"x12" which I made for FiberArts Squared. The first theme is 'comfort'. After some googling I came up with this idea:
Comfort after a long day. Take off those high-heeled shoes, sit down in a nice chair and have a drink. Maybe a glass of Southern Comfort? Whatever you prefer, just relax. You deserve it.