journal quilt

This is my last journal quilt for this year. After a couple of years creating monthly journal quilts I have decided to take a break coming year. No monthly fabric journal quilts. There are other challenges planned.
This journal quilt started out as a hand dyed piece of fabric. I stitched the folds and painted the fabric with Golden acrylics. When the paint was dry, I removed the stitches. This design did not need an extra overlaying pattern of quilting, so I kept it simple and only quilted along the painted lines.

mail art

Some time ago I showed the envelopes I made for Lenna's mail art swap. This picture shows what I got in return. Envelopes - and cards - are made by Vicky Martindale, Sabine Schneider and Susan Stewart and by Lenna herself. All so different and all lovely. It was the first time that I made mail art, but I am tempted to do this more often :-)

snow

This is how my garden looked yesterday morning. A - for Dutch standards - thick layer of snow had fallen. Not my favorite type of weather.
The only attractive part of it, is that I can snow dye. Here is a picture of one of the pieces of fabric I dyed this weekend:

There are 5 more of them, but I am not going to show you all of them now. Partly because it might be boring, partly because I have not yet ironed them:-). All pieces are roughly 1/2 yard wide.

journal quilt

Again a bit late, but here is the picture of November's journal quilt. It is a handdyed piece of fabric, which I folded and stitched before I painted it. Don't ask me exactly which colors I used, cause I do not remember this anymore. But I do know that I used Golden acrylics. The quilting is very limited, only following the painted lines as they are the ones who draw the most attention. Elaborate quilting would have ruined that effect.

storage

When you like surface design and art quilting there is a lot of stuff you can use. And all that stuff needs some kind of storage space. In other words when you are a pack rat :-). Not only storage might be a problem, finding the stuff when you need it might even be a bigger problem. Quite some time ago I fell in love the the ArtBin containers. They are wonderful for all the thread I have, but the other size of containers are great for smaller stuff. Only when you put them on top of each other, there is some unwritten law that the things you need are always in the bottom container. Can you imagine how happy I was when I discovered that ArtBin also has cubes? And not only that, there is one on-line shop in the Netherlands who sells them? Here is a picture of the 2 cubes I assembled yesterday:
Four containers with thread are in one cube, while 6 thinner containers fit in the top cube. The 2 cubes are attached to each other with wooden dowels. On top of the cubes is place for my Madeira box. Okay this does not mean that my studio is now nice and clean, but it is looking better. I know that I need/want more of those cubes.

atc's

I will not show you all the atc's I make, but this set I am very happy with. Painting and drawing is not what I do best, but I think these are acceptable. For these poppies I used pencil and water color paint. And yes, they are made for a swap at ATC's For All :-)

snow dyeing

This piece of fabric I dyed for Sally. She requested a purple color. Well snow dyeing is not an exact science. With mixed colors you will get separation of the colors which are used in that specific mix. For this piece of fabric I used blue/violet and lila, both Procion MX dyes. By looking at the separation I am presuming that lilac is a diluted pure purple color either Boysenberry MX-BR or Grape MX- GN. The separation of the blue/violet is clearly visible. This piece is 46" (1,15 mtr) wide.

snow

Winter is starting early this year. When I saw the first snow flakes falling a couple of days ago, my first reaction was saying a couple of words my mother never taught me :-). On the other hand it gives me a chance to do some snow dyeing. Here are the first 2 pieces of fabric I did. The first one is dyed with Moccha and the second one with Kilt Green. As both these dyes are mixed and not pure MX colors, you see the separation of the colors.

At the moment I am dyeing two new pieces of fabric in their colanders.