journal quilt

On the last day of the month I was able to complete July's journal quilt. Okay, the label will be attached in August, but that is okay :-). The fabric I worked with started out as a drop cloth. Extra paint (house hold emulsion) was sprinkled over it. From freezer paper I made a template for the word 'art', ironed this onto the fabric and added black textile paint. Some random free motion quilting was added in the same design as the paint was sprinkled. As usual for this year the size is 7"x10". Title is 'Graffitti'.

journal quilts

As you know I make a monthly journal quilt for the CQGB (the contemporary quilters group of the quilters Guild of the British Isles). What you might not know is that they have annual shows of these journal quilts. This year I am sending in these 3 journal quilts:
All 3 I have shown here before. The one at the left I changed a bit as the original metal wire did not show up enough. I replaced it with a thicker wire and placed the woven quilt on a black background. This way it shows more depth.
Materials I used in these 3 quilts are: felt, craft wire, black fabric, white fabric, cheese cloth, paint, again felt, burlap and concrete. Not all these materials are used by every art quilter, but I loved playing with them :-)

fabric dyeing

The last week most of my time was taken up with cleaning/reorganising my studio. This was really needed as I could not find the things I needed and I knew I still had. By reading this you can probably guess that this is not my favorite way of spending my time :-). The only art-related things I did was stitching the fused canal houses, but that is not something which looks different than the pictures I showed you of the fused stage. So no new pictures of that.
What I can show you is some icecube dyeing I did this weekend. I had frozen some dye concentrate left over from the poppy petals I dyed. When the concentrate is frozen it is practically impossible to see what color the ice cube is. I soda soaked half a yard of fabric, crunched it into a container and placed 10-12 ice cubes on it. After they had melted the fabric looked like this:
A bit too much white was still there so I decided to overdye it, using turqoise. I mixed a dye concentrate of about 5% diluted this with water and added this to the container in which the freshly soda soaked fabric was crunched. As you can see the white is gone and the colors show some more depth because of this over dyeing.

and more canal houses

Here are the remaining 6 canal houses. Everything is fused to the stabiliser and ready to be stitched. I will do this as little as possible so that the recipient of the houses can quilt them without running into problems. With a previous swap some of the tops were completely quilted which made it very difficult for me to add more stitching lines.

After working on these houses and searching for fabric I wanted to use, you can imagine how my studio now looks like. No, I am not showing you a picture of it :-), but it definately needs cleaning up.

canal houses

Normally I am working at several projects at the same time. Besides my big c&g quilt another project is the canal houses. With a group of friends we all make 10 houses which we will swap so that every participant receives a house from every body. Only the top is made and that one is even not completely quilted and/or embellished. If this would be done the joining together of all the pieces would become very difficult.
This week I worked on 4 houses. Right now they are only fused. Later this week I will stitch the edged of the applique and figure out which embellishments I want to add. Probably I will put these in little ziplock baggies and send them of with the house.
All fabric is handdyed/stamped/discharged, either by me or from a swap. The inserts of the twinhouse - top picture at the right - are cut out of paint/decorating brochures.

storm at sea

In an earlier blog post I showed you the fabric I dyed for the poppies. It had the colors I wanted, but I wanted to make some more marks on it to give a more realistic looking effect. As I wanted these effects only on specific places, I had to cut out the petals before I could add the paint. The areas closest to the stem I colored darker using a mixture of black/red/rust textile paints diluted with water so that the color bleeded a bit. This is how they looked after they had dried:
Some of you wanted to see the whole quilt. It is a bit difficult to take a picture of it, as it is bigger than my design wall plus the room is very narrow. Here are two pictures of the quilt taken from an angle:

It is still far from finished, but looking much better now the poppies have been fused to it. Plans for the coming days are to add some leaves and quilt the poppies. After that the next step can be started.

journal quilt

A bit late but here is my journal quilt for June. All the fabrics I used are my own handdyed ones. The background started out as a dark blue Kona which got discharged and overdyed. I must admit I have never seen a bird with these colors, but I think it is very pretty :-)
The inspiration came from young birds which have left the nest but are still a bit insecure about their flying capabilities and spend quite some time hiding under plants. Size - as usual - 7"x10". Title: Young bird.

c&g quilt

In spite of the heat I managed to get all the quilting done on this big quilt. Here are two detail pictures of the designs I used:

And not only that I also dyed the fabric which I will be using for the poppies. I used tangerine, mixing red and mixing blue in all these fabrics:

To get these colors I used my color bible made during Carol Soderlund classes. Often I just play with the different colors, but now and then if I am after a specific color, I use those samples as reference guide.