some more lines

If you read my blog on a regular base, you know that one of my themes this year is lines. Here are pictures of my most recent finished quilt. Years ago when I was in Uganda I bought a couple of yards of bark cloth (Check out this link to find out more about bark cloth.) and I have to admit that I had hardly used it. Time to change this. I picked a piece of bleached Kona cotton and placed a piece of bark cloth on it:

As I am working with the theme lines, the quilting was done is simply lines :-). Here is a close up of it:

And this is how it looked when it was done:



As a background it is oké, but it needed something to catch the attention. For a couple of years I participated on a regular base in swapping dye samples. Each sample was 2,5"x2,5" and I think I have a couple of thousands of them. I don't need the samples anymore because since I took several dyeing classes with Carol Soderlund I know how to dye every color I want. I picked out a number of squares, fused them to Bondaweb and cut squarish circles out of them. Arranged them on the quilt and stitched them. And this is how it turned out:

Size of this quilt is 22"x12". Maybe not the first idea when you think of lines but who said that lines have to be straight?

Shows 2013

The last couple of years I have taken several online classes by Pamela Allen. This resulted in an exhibition which will travel with the Mancuso shows to several places during 2013. Here is the announcement I copied from the Mancuso site:

Hens and Chickens

Synnove Vanar Hvalstad, Norway	Karol Kusmaul Inverness, Florida	Rosemary Hopkins St. Louis, Missouri	Wil Opio Oguta Almere, Netherlands

Pamela Allen has collected the best of her students’ work from online art quilt classes. Even though her class convenes online, cyberspace allows for in depth critiques of work in progress, exchange of information about art history and a growing camaraderie among the participants. Who knew classes could become international learning seminars yet fun and friendly exchanges of mutual problems and triumphs? Being able to share one’s issues with others who are working on the same assignment has been one of the big surprises of working online. Pamela affectionately refers to her students as her "Chickens" and herself as the "Mother Hen." Thus, the title of the exhibition.

Shows 2013

I have added a new page to my blog in which the shows are listed for which work of mine has been accepted. Besides these there are a number of others for which I am waiting to hear if they accept my work or not. I will add to this page whenever a new show is official.

Gingko leaves

The Fallen Gingko Leaves are completed. Here is the picture of the final result:

The quilt has been folded wrong sides facing out to prevent (white) cat hair getting on it. I just hanged it and the folds still have to 'unsettle'. Here are some detail pictures of the quilting:

Size of this quilt is 43"x31". And for the people who know me, the next quilt is almost finished as well .

Favorite movie continued

And here is the Tree of Souls completed:

 And a detail picture of the branches/tentacles:

It took a number of hours before all the branches/tentacles were finished, but I am happy with the result :-). The size of this quilt is my usual one, 12"x12".

Favorite movie

For Sky-is-the-Limit this month's theme is favorite movie. My first idea was to use The Color Purple as inspiration source, but when I was working on it I changed my mind :-). I have been making rather a lot of tree quilts the last couple of months, so wouldn't the Tree of Souls be a much better idea. For you who are not familiair with this tree, it is from the movie Avatar. This tree is of extreme spiritual importance for the Na'vi (the people who live on the planet Pandora.

I forgot to take a picture of the background before I applied the tree, but here it is after the quilting and the applique:

The next step was to attach the white 'branches' to the tree. For my first attempt I used plain white cotton thread for it as you can see in this picture:

but I was not really very happy with it. My second attempt was using metallic Madeira embroidery thread and this is a better solution. It is difficult to capture the sparkling effect with a picture, so you have to believe me :-).

I pull the embroidery thread through every stitch on the green branches. It gives a very nice effect, but is time consuming.

Snow

Winter is for people who live on the frozen tundra synonym for snow, but here in the Netherlands yesterday was the second day this winter that we had snow. And if you happen to be a dyer like I am, you have to take advantage of this snow :-). Here are two pictures of fabric I dyed:

There are different ways of using snow as a resist, but in this case I packed presoaked fabric into a colander, put snow on top of it and poured dye concentrate over it, added a bit more snow and some more concentrate. This I left till all the snow had melted. After this I put the fabric into a closed container in the microwave for twice 2 minutes. Took it out, opened the container - the steam is very hot!! - washed it with cold water, followed with hot and some syntrapol.

progress with gingko leaves

The last couple of days I have been working on the gingko leaves. The quilt is in different lengths so it is more complicated to make a good looking edge finishing. I did not want to do a binding, so I made a kind of facing. After that I worked on the free motion quilting. Here are 2 detail pictures:

In the small strips in between the leaves I quilted the text: "Before you know it autumn is here and leaes are falling everywhere. Are they telling secrets to each other while the wind blows them around?". The leaves - which still have the original color of the fabric - are quilted like veins.

Another oldie

My stash of hand dyed fabrics is not exactly small , some of them stay there for a short time, but other wait longer. This piece of fabric has been in my stash since 2009. Yes rather a long time. The size is around 40"x40" and I wanted to do something with this fabric without cutting it up.

In July I knew what I wanted to do with it. I had bought some bottles of Decolourant Mist and intended to use these on this fabric. I cut out several shapes of gingko leaves out of freezer paper and played with positioning them on the fabric. While doing that I discovered that the whole would be a bit static. Time for the roller cutter :-). I cut the fabric into 3 strips and repositioned the templates. Still not quite to my liking. So a bit more cutting: 2 thin ones this time. The templates were ironed on the 9"x wide strips, the 2 thin ones remained like they were. I sprayed the templates with the Decolourant, let it dry and ironed them. This is how everything looked after that. On purpose the strips are of different length.

Tree

By now I do not know whether it is a Blogger problem or an Explorer problem, but I managed to get this picture uploaded to my blog using Chrome.

Trees

Blogger is having issues at the moment. Every time I tried to upload pictures to the blog, the program got stuck and nothing happened. When I tried a detour by uploading directly from Picasa I got an error claiming that the upload did not work, but strangely enough the picture showed up as a draft in my list. By copying/pasting I was able to put the pictures into this blogpost. When I googled the error, I found that they had this problem before. Hopefully Blogger solved this problem soon, because this is not a fun way to do it. So with some delay, I was able to create this blogpost :-).

The project I was working on is finished, but you have to wait till I find a proper place to hang the quilt, before I can take a picture of it.

In the mean time I worked on another one. I am a member of  Voyage and for this year we are working with a different size: A3 or 12"x17". The theme I will work on this year is trees. And my first quilt for this challenge is completed. For background I used a piece of snow dyed fabric, not in one piece, but in strips. Here is a picture of the background fabric:

I prefer to do my quilting before I do the applique. Maybe a bit unusual, but much easier with the quilting :-). Sorry but I forgot to take a picture at this stage.
The final stage was adding the tree. For this I used a commercial black fabric, fused it, cut out the shape of the tree and  ironed it onto the top. Additional quilting was added. Just like my previous quilt I did a facing to avoid a very visible binding and this is how the final results looks like:



Title of this quilt is Winter Sunrise.

update

Although I am quiet, I am still here. Blogger does not want me to add pictures to my posts, no idea why, and a blog post without pictures is not really my thing. Hopefully I can show something soon.