Spinning Out of Control-July FFFC

The challenge this month was to use radial symmetry and the colors of nature-which certainly did not restrict our color choices!  The first inspiration for this piece was Fourth of July fireworks, but it finally came to symbolise how I felt with a health problem (fortunately nothing major) that was occuring this month. Thus the title-Spinning Out of Control. The piece is 16″ x 16″.

Silk Flowers Quilt

Silk Flowers (25 1/2″  x 31″ )

Last fall, I received an e-mail from a high school friend asking if I could use any fabric samples that he had available from his work. I asked if he had silk samples, he wrote back yes, and in the next 4 months, he sent me four boxes of lovely, varied pieces of silk. I practiced on a few of the pieces, but this is the first major piece I did using the silk. The border is a silk velvet, the rest are similar to a dupioni weight. They did fray, but otherwise were easy to use, kept a nice fold for the applique, and just shone in the right lighting.

My self-challenge with this piece was to use some of the pastel colors-definitely not my normal color range! All the edges of the leaves and petals were turned under and either machine or hand appliqued. The petals were outlined in stem stitch and beads added to the yellow centers. Machine quilted designs added to the dimension of the petals.

I had planned to just have the blue border, but my art quilt group liked my backing fabric and thought if I had more, adding that would help. Of course, I didn’t have more, but found the wonderful blue-green velvet. I was worried about the heaviness of it, but just cut the batting away from the border area.

I’m not sure this is my most artistic quilt, but I do feel I used the pastels effectively, and learned a lot about plugging through when I really wanted to junk the whole project. The detail photo was taken with the quilt on the floor-on the wall, the quilting did not show up in a photo.

Fast Friday Fabric Challenge

This challenge group is a subgroup of the quiltart list and focuses on doing a challenge proposed by a member on the last Friday of the month and due on the Saturday of the next week. The challenge this month was to use split complementary colors and a S shape in the design.

This was a busy week and thoughts about the challenge would pop in and out of my mind randomly. Saturday morning, as I was laying on the floor stretching, the whole quilt came through in one flash. My theme is whatever is going on in my life at the time of the challenge and the idea came of a horizontal orientation, with a flock of birds coming back with the spring weather (flying in an S shape formation which is not strictly accurate), and bare trees underneath them at the bottom of the quilt. The birds would be dark blue purple against a yellow and orange sky. As I looked out the window, there was a small flock of grackles swarming into the trees in the backyard!

 

The orange of the sky and the birds are fused and  the trees were first drawn in with a purple fabric marker. That didn’t look quite right so I ended up threadpainting them-which was boring as heck and very time consuming, but I finally decided definitely worth the work. The size is 22 1/2′ x 11″.

Sign of Spring

SAQA Auction Piece

Not having the inspiration or energy to start a large new piece,  I decided to get my 12″ x 12″ SAQA auction piece started. (See http://www.saqa.com/hotnews.aspx?id=190 for the information and images of some pieces). I pulled a red Guatamalan type fabric out of the stash and found some complemtary fabrics and started to play. Having just finished a piece with straight lines, I wanted to use curves on this one. I cut several curved pieces with very irregular edges and laid them overlapping on top of the red fabric. I kept building with more curved pieces until I thought the design was balanced and interesting, then glued the pieces down and zigzaged the edges. Different stitching designs were used for quilting and beads added in some places. But it still lacked something. I thought of using a sheer fabric motif on top, but wasn’t sure about the edges. But in looking for a sheer fabric, I found a bag of sheer ribbons-bingo! I’m calling it Memories of Color-because in the middle of February, it’s good to remember when the world has more color than grey, white and brown!

SAQANY Trunk Show

I continued using my collage class inspiration to make a piece for this show that will travel to several quilt shows and exhibits places over the next 6 months. I pulled out a hideous (I thought) piece of handpainted fabric and fortunately looked at the back side first. Perfect! Then I pulled a batik fabric and a piece of blue-green-gold paper that I had purchased at an art shop. The gold upholstery fabric came from the teacher and the black netting and sheer ribbon from the classroom art box.  My own beads were added at the end. It is machine quilted and is about 16″ x 16”. I titled it “Some of My Favorite Things”  since I felt I had used many of my favorite things in it.

Favorites

Collage Class

Last  fall, I participated in a collage  class through our local school. In the first two sessions, I worked with paper; for the third one,  I switched to using fabric. The best part of this class was being able to use stuff from the teacher and from the art classroom where we were meeting.  Being in a class motivated me to take time to just play and to learn how to start with a fabric or two, then add whatever struck my eye as I scavenged, adding and deleting until  something appeared that I was happy with. The piece below started with a purchased hand-dyed napkin (one of six),  to which I added some painted tile tape, some beads with letters, some green scrap fabric of mine, some green-blue silk fusion paper, a piece of yellow-green yarn, lace from the classroom stash, and beads from my stash. I backed it with felt, hand stitched little X’s, then attached the felt to stretcher strips. The size is 18” by 18′ .