background papers

As you might know, I have been bitten by the atc-bug and for these little cards you can never have enough interesting backgrounds. My friend and I made a couple of sheets using different techniques. The first two pictures show the result of different acrylic paints on gessoed watercolor paper. Stamps and punchinella (sequin waste) have been used to get interesting prints:

For the other two sheets we used procion dyes as ink on the same type of paper. Added some salt or sand to get interesting patterns. The first picture is done on plain watercolor paper:

The second one is done on gessoed watercolor paper. As you can see you get a more muted effect:

Even though the sheets of paper look very interesting like they are, they are even more interesting when cut up into atc-size.

Flying geese

A couple of days ago I showed the compressed sponges of geese. Well this is what I did with them:
I applied different colors of decolourant plus on it an pressed the stamps onto the fabric. The colors I used were yellow/brown/bronze/gold. When the decolourant is applied to the fabric you really feel that it is on top of the fabric. After ironing it, it just feels like the fabric. That it is a discharge is obvious when you look at the back of your fabric. I could not see this from the front.
My plan was to add some traditional flying geese as well to the top, but I must admit that I forgot this completely. Guess I have to use these in the quilting design. At the moment the top looks like this:

When the quilt is complete it will measure 39"x39". The quilting I intend to do, will be around the geese and maybe add a few details to the birds. Okay, first top is done, 2 other ones are in the pipeline.

new quilts

The last couple of days I have been designing several quilt tops. To be exact 3 designs, each will be 39"x39" and they will be related in a way to a quilt made some time ago: 'Do you want to come along?'. The first one I am working on will be a flying geese quilt. No, not the traditional flying geese, but these:
The picture shows 2 of my flying geese templates made of compressed sponge on the blue dyed background fabric. Today I am working with the templates so stay tuned for the next blogpost to see what I am doing with them.

atc's

Progress on the Klimt quilt is slow, so showing you a new picture will not add anything. Instead of that here are some atc's I worked on the last week:

Different techniques/materials have been used for these, ranging from fabric, markers, soy wax, collage to Adobe photoshop manipulation.

old quilt

Is it not amazing what you find when you are clearing up the mess in your studio? LOL A year ago I started on a quilt based on a drawing by Klimt. It is rather narrow and long so a bit difficult to take a proper picture of:

I used commercial batiks for it. At that time I had no idea how to quilt it and it ended up under a pile of fabric and other stuff. Last week I found it again and began with the quilting. Here is the design I used for the dress:

Although it looks like it is now almost finished, that is only partly true. This quilt will be part of a diptych. I have some ideas about how and what will be done for the second one, but that is for a later post.

Follow by email

There are so many things I am involved with, that I do not have time every day to write a blog post. If you don't want to miss anything, you can of course visit my blog every day to see whether there is something new. But you might be as busy as I am :-). If so you can put your email address in the gadget 'follow by email'. If you do this, you get an email when there is a new post. I have not yet been able to find out how quickly you get this message, but they claim that they send it to you the same day. Well, let's say you get it within 24 hours after posting :-)

April block

As you can see, the color for this month is pink. By the end of the year I want to combine all the blocks into one quilt and use them as a background. This is the reason that I will stick to variations of the lopsided log cabin for every block I make this year. All fabrics used are my own handdyed or handpainted. The decorative yarns I use are commercial ones.