Broken Lines

Last week I showed you the beginning of this project. I added more strips to it and cut these into different lengths. After quilting I handstitched the quilt onto a painted canvas and this is how it looks now:

 Here you can see a detail:

I made this quilt in my series lines for the Free Spirit Artist group. This is the 6th quilt in this series. The canvas is 16"x20" and the title is Broken Lines. While working on this series I discovered that there are many ways in wich lines can be used. Will I continue working with this theme the coming year? I don't know yet.

new project - new group

If you follow my blog you know that I belong to several groups. This motivates me to make quilts tailored to specific themes. For one of my groups - Free-spirit-artists - I started working on a new project. The theme is lines and on the picture you can see the beginning of it. Okay, I admit you can not yet see much, but that will come later :-)Right now I am also involved in setting up a new online group which will work with a bi-monthly theme. If you are interested in joining us, please leave a comment and make certain that I can reach you. The 'noreplyblogger'  address is not very usuable :-)

Ghost flowers

If you read my blog on a regular base, you know that I am working on another big quilt. I completed the quilting in the last week of May and after that I spend lots of hours removing the quilting paper. Next step was to cut out the flowers and stitch these to the background. The background fabric is a whole cloth, which I dyed several years ago. The fabric for the ghost flowers is a pounded one. Another oldie :-). I have not yet measured this quilt exactly, but the size is roughly 40"x40". I am a member of the Free Spirit Artist group and my theme for this year is lines. This is another piece for that theme. I am linking this post to Nina-Marie's Off the Wall Friday.

Silent Water

For the Free Spirit Artists group my theme for the coming year is lines. This may sound boring, but there are many ways in which you can use lines. Late 2010 I made a journal quilt using stitched lines and paint. The fabric was folded and stitched like that, next step was to paint the fabric, let it dry and remove the stitched lines. This is how the journal quilt looked when it was finished:

I really loved this technique and wanted to do it again on a bigger scale. So I picked a half yard of fabric which I had dyed. Don't ask me which color I used because this was somewhere in 2011. Stitching all those lines was so boring that regularly it was put away to do something more interesting :-). After many months the stitching was finally done (July 2012) and this is a detail picture of how the back looked like:

And this is how it looked from the front:

Finally it was time to play. I pinned the fabric on top of a foam board and opened several Lumiere paint bottles, shimmering pearl, blue, turquoise and a bit of pale green. This is how it looked after the painting:

And now the fun part, removing all the stitches and ironing it. At last you could see how it was going to look:

Time to start quilting. As the main focus of this top was lines (and this was months before I decided to work with this theme) the quilting lines just followed the painted lines. Interesting, but it needed a bit more. I decided on adding turquoise beads on it. But before I could add these, the quilt had to be blocked and sleeve added as well. I did not want a traditional border around it, but decided to do a facing. This made the quilt a bit narrower, but that was okay. When this was done I ordered several different types of turquoise beads - and of course did not use all the different ones - and this is how it looks now:

From beginning to end it almost took 2 years to complete it, but I am happy with it. The title Silent Water refers to the reflection you see on water, not knowing that the falling beads will disrupt the silence quite soon. Who said that lines were boring? :-)
This quilt is the first one in my series of Lines. Size is 17"x37".