Tulip fields

One of the themes I am working with this year is aerial views. This quilt is one of them and it for Voyage. I live in the Netherlands and every spring you can see these colorful  tulip fields. Size of this quilt is 12"x17" and all the fabrics I have used are my own hand dyed ones.

And as it is a Friday, I am linking this post to Nina-Marie's Off the Wall Friday.

Within the Circle

Here is another circle quilt. For Stitched I have to make 4 quilts with this theme by the end of the year, but I am having so much fun that this is number 3 :-).

Most black fabrics discharge to a light brown/yellow when you use bleach, but now and than you find a fabric which discharges to white. This is one of those. I bought it a couple of years ago from Whaleys-Bradford. It is their H200 cotton black (lawn).
For the quilting I used a red thread. After that I stitched the circles on it. The circles are made from commercial felt. I was not happy how the stitching lines on the felt looked, so I covered them with a blanket stitch using a red pearl cotton. Size is 12"x24" (30x60 cm). Title of this one is 'Within the Circle'.

Circles never end

For Stitched my theme this year is circles and yes I know the total number of quilts for this year is 4, I have completed my second one already :-). When I was working on my Onion quilt, I had another idea as well. Of course I could have waited till April to start with it, but I have time available at the moment, so why not start straight away. This quilt started out as one piece of snow dyed fabric. Added batting and a backing fabric and stitched the outlines. Turned everything around and cut an opening in the backing fabric close to the top. I cut a number of circles out of freezer paper and started playing around to found a interesting design. After that I stitched around the circles and removed the paper. The quilting I did on the rest of the quilt was just straight lines.
The next part was the scary part. I cut out the central part of the circles. If I had made a mistake I could have thrown the quilt away, but luckily everything went okay. Of course the color of the batting was white and this would show a bit, I used a pink marker to give the batting some color. With floss I hand stitched around the circles. The straight lines needed more quilting so I added lots of circles on it as you can see on the detail picture.
Years ago I found a capiz shell lamp in a garage sale. I did not have any use for the lamp, but I wanted the shells :-). These shells I added to the open spaces and this is how the quilt looks now:

 And a detail:

The quilting I did on this piece gave me lots and lots of thread ends. I could have connected the circles, but this would have give another look and that was not what I wanted. Size is 12"x24" (30x60 cm) and the title is Circles never end.

Eagle's View

For Voyage the theme this year is Earth. A broad subject, lots of options here. I decided to work with aerial views of different aspects. Here is my first quilt for this theme:

I have called this quilt Eagle's View. It is a view of part of the river Nile, just a bit south of Murchison Falls in Uganda. All fabrics used are my own hand dyed ones. The quilting I did in such a way that it resembles altitude lines. Size is 12"x17".  And as it is a Friday today, I am linking this post to Nina Marie's Off the Wall Friday.

Life is like an onion

I am a member of several international online groups because I like working in a small scale and having a theme. Recently I became a member of Stitched. With this group each member picks her theme and makes 4 quilts this year in the size of 12"x24". My theme for this year is circles. This may sound a bit boring, but you will see that interesting quilts can be made with a theme like this.

My first quilt for this group started with a visit to the super market. I needed a big onion. Okay, I admit, I love onion soup, but this one I needed for stamping. I sliced the onion in 2 parts and let it dry for a couple of days so that the separate rings show better. In the mean time I prepared the fabric. The centre of the quilt is made from a piece of snow dyed fabric with a big black border around it. 

When the onion had dried enough I applied a thin layer of decoulorant plus on top (gold and bronze) and placed my stamp on the fabric.

This proces I repeated till I had a pleasing arrangement of 'circles'. After the decoulorant had dried I ironed it - a very smelly process -, but I was happy with the result. The circles I quilted with a gold metallic thread following the rings as much as possible. The other part of the quilt I quilted with a wavy grid using blue and black thread. This is how the completed quilt looks like:

 And a detail shot:

And yes I should have used a lint roller to remove the cat hair :-)
For the title I found inspiration in a quote by Carl Sandburg: 'Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time and sometimes you weep.

Ice dyeing

Temperatures here are around 50 degrees F (10 degrees C) so the chance of snow dyeing is zero. But as I did happen to have a bag of ice cubes in the freezer, I could still to some dyeing :-). I soda soaked 4 pieces of fabric and crunched them into my gutter. For dyeing purposes I have a gutter about 3 feet long. The ice cubes were placed on top of this and I added 3 different colors of blue over it. The blues I used were all pure ones: deep navy, mixing blue and turquoise. Because of this you do not see the splitting of colors what happens when you use mixed colors. Here are the pictures of how the fabric turned out:

I am linking this post to Nina Marie's Off the Wall Friday.

a new year and a new exhibit

I wish you all a happy new year and I have to admit that mine started very well :-). I received an email from the Light Space & Time Gallery that 2 of my quilts have been selected for their January Seasons Art Exhibition. Winterblues received a Special Recognition:

 and Abstract Autumn a Special Merit:

Check out the links to see what else is in the exhibition.