Still life with flowers

I was told that of yesterday's picture not enough of the texture could be seen. Here are some detail pictures:

The vase is made from folded fabric. After folding I ironed it onto some Bondaweb. I did the quilting along the lines so that I would not flatten the texture.

The pink flower was made from several layers of embossed felt and a button as centre. Stems are made from rolled tubes of fabric.

For these flowers I used different techniques. The yellow one on the right is made from zapped organza. The purple one from 2 layers of fused batik. To get depth part of the petals is pushed up away from the background. The brown one is made from several layers of fused fabric. The edges are cut to give it a more frayed look. And the yellow/red one is made from different layers of hand dyed scrim. Buttons or beads are used for the centres. On purpose some of the flowers are 'outside' the rectangular of the quilt.

Still life with flowers

One of the 4 still life quilts I am working on is now completely finished and hanging on my wall. By lack of a more interesting title I have called it 'Still life with flowers'. The idea for this still life was to use and play with texture. Well I have used a lot of it :-). Part of the background fabric and the vase is pleated. The pears in the bowl are stuffed and because they are so thick I have glued them to the quilt with E6000. The stems of the flowers are rolled tubes over pipe cleaners and for the flowers I used all kind of different techniques. Buttons and beads were added to the centre of the flowers. Here is a picture of the result:

Now I can continue finishing the other 3 quilts.

Stamping

The last couple of days I have been working on my still life quilts. Finishing the details like machine quilting, getting rid of thread ends and attaching the binding, sleeve and labels. All kind of things which don't lead to interesting pictures. I will be doing this the coming days as well. But I can show you a picture of some stamping with ink I did today. You know that I am an online class junkie and I had signed up for one of Lenna Andrew's classes. The first lesson was - amongst others - on stamping with ink. My stash of all kind of materials is rather high, so I did not need to buy anything for it. With some of my ink pads and some of my stamps I created this piece of fabric. When the ink has set I will add some background color to it, but at the moment I have no idea what color or what ink/paint/dye to use for it.

Block

For a friend who is going through a rough time I made this still life block. Size is 10"x10". It is made in the same style as I have been working with the last couple of weeks. I am not going to tell you her name cause she might be reading this and than the surprise is gone.

still life enlarged

The still life I showed here a couple of days ago was too cramped. I added some more fabric to the background and that gave me space to give the table proper legs. Also I changed a couple of things and added some circles - balls ? - on the floor. Right now I am preparing it so that I can start machine quilting on it coming weekend. For this I have to remove the leaves temporarily as I want to quilt the background before I stitch the leaves on. To give it a bit of 3d effect I intend to stitch the leaves with only one line of stitching through the middle of the leaves. Anyway this is how the piece looks now:

dyeing

The last couple of days I have been experimenting with ice dyeing. Ice at least I can make the whole year through while snow is rare here :-) Al though I might buy a snow cone machine later this year. Unfortunately I can not tell you which dyes I used for which piece as I did not keep notes. I know that I used Bordeaux from G&K and I think Olive as well. The colors are more intense on the pieces which I nuked after melting/batching. For some of these pieces I put the dye mixture into the freezer and let it just freeze. On other fabrics I have placed ice cubes and let them melt there. Each technique gives a slightly different effect. And they are all different from snow dyeing. Here are some results:

Resist

In between working on my still lifes I also did some resist dyeing this week. Completely forgot that I had signed up for a swap which was due yesterday. As resist I used Elmer's glue. I applied the glue to the fabric and used a fork to draw thin lines through it. At least that was the idea. The lines were so thin that they were not visible :-(. When I discovered that I used a piece of bubble wrap for the remaining fabric. First layer of dye used was yellow, the second layer was done with bordeaux. If I had more time I would redo part of it, but unfortunately I am already late in swapping.

The picture on the left shows the real color of the fabric. For some strange reason the one on the right is off color.