Sandwiching

Even after all my good intentions about making my quilting a priority, I find myself in a position where I have said yes to too many good causes, along with some unexpected and unagreed-to responsibilities being dumped in my lap.  In my muddled brain that keeps spawning images, I have begun to see a quilt:  a small person holding a large bag on a sinking ship that the rats are deserting. I could make some really disgusting rats at this point.

So I have had to content myself with sandwiching my quilting in between bouts of making flyers, attending meetings, writing e-mails, and creating websites.  My quick job for the week was finishing the painted leaf I created in the Playing with Paint class I took.  It was a Valentine's gift to my husband  and I was worried about quilting it--that the leaf would no longer float quite so nicely on top of the bark, but all is well.

In a 2D photo you can hardly see the quilting, but it does add another layer of texture to this little quilt, and binding ultimately seemed more appropriate than quilting.  I will add a small sleeve and a label in between other tasks next week.  It's only 7 1/2 x 10 1/2" so it was a quick project.

And if you are still reading me, thanks for the company.

Finished!

It seems as though I have had many projects in the state of process for a long time.  One of my big projects is done but not ready to be photographed yet. And so I turned to some of my smaller projects this week. One began as an exercise in the painting on fabric class I took last February, although it seems it's been sitting around much longer than that.  I was trying a wash on wet fabric and the result was a great little piece with green fading into blue, with strong colors around the edges and light tints in the middle.  It was about the size of a page, 8 x 11" but not quite squared up--these were practice pieces,after all.  I loved the strong color on the edges and decided to leave it as is and create a small wall hanging around it.  I, of course, forgot to take a picture at this stage.  One day I will remember. . .

The colors strongly suggested a landscape and as I played with adding shapes to emphasize the blues and greens, I also began to see it as an old manuscript page or even a page from a book and so I added lines of color and surrounded it with a piece of my green hand-dyes.  I liked the idea of combining nature, writing, and quilting.  And here is "Text in Context":

It's now about 16 x 20" and once again I feel the real thing looks better than its photo.  Perhaps that's just an artist's excuse, comparable somehow to "The check is in the mail," but the light colors are delicate and don't show up well nor does the texture quilting I did on the green fabric.  But perhaps the photo is indicating a weakness in my work; perhaps it should have enough value contrast so that the elements are strong even in a photo.

Anyway, if you are still reading, thanks for the company!

My Version of a Valentine

For a good number of years, probably since I realized how important quilting is in my life, I have given Tom a little quilt for Valentine's Day.  Well, usually it is a quilt-in-progress, a.k.a. a quilt top, that many times adds to the height of my quilts-in-progress pile.  Last year I did manage to finish the quilt

This year, instead of hand-dyes, his quilt top was hand painted:

This is one of the pieces that began life as an exercise in the fabric painting class I talked about in my last post.   Our instructions were to try printing with string on a brayer and that technique produced the original blue lines that looked like bark to me.  I did a brown color wash over that and finished it off with the leaf print.  

At first I thought the print had not worked because the house was dry as the furnace fought the arctic temperatures we were having, and any paint on my palette or on the leaf itself dried almost immediately so the print was not as clear or "complete" as others I had done.   But when I looked at it the next day I realized  I liked it--and that it would make the perfect gift for my tree-loving husband.  

I have not quilted it yet and that may change its look a bit so I thought I'd share it with you now.  And, if you are still with me, thanks for the company.

Out of My Comfort Zone

One of my complaints about taking some quilting classes is that I end up going to a great deal of trouble and money buying some items on the supply list that I use for about ten seconds or not at all.  Jacquard textile paints are an example:  I bought a set for a class several years ago and used exactly one brushful of one of the jars and they have sat on my shelf ever since.  So when I noticed that Lyric Kinard was offering an online class called Playing with Paint at Quilt University and the supply list included Jacquard textile paints I thought it might be time to try to get these off that shelf and do something with them.  Besides, it is definitely too cold to spend much time in my basement dyeing fabric, aside from the occasional snow dyeing, so this would be a way to create some interesting fabric even in the depths--and this winter has been particularly deep--of winter.

Now painting is not my strong suit; in fact it wasn't even in the deck of cards I played at quilting with, unless you include the Setacolor sundyeing I have done now and again.  But I knew Lyric was especially gentle with those students stepping outside their comfort zones.

So here are some examples of some of the things I have been working on the past couple of weeks:

This is a simple scrunching technique that makes a great background.  

These three are all prints done with various things around the house--poinsettia leaf, orange, and cranberries.  I will probably go back and add more color to all of them, but I particularly liked the orange--and who would have thought there was such a neat pattern inside a cranberry!

As  you can see, we are not painting pictures in this class, thank goodness.  The nearest I came to that was this doodle page I made where we were trying out a dry brush technique with some other techniques thrown in for good measure. Van Gogh has no competition here, but I learned a little about holding a brush and how it feels to apply this paint to fabric.                                                                      

Since I knew so little about painting on fabric, I have indeed greatly increased my knowledge in that area.  Some of the techniques are similar to ones I use in dyeing, and some I will try when I get out my dyes again, but I have changed my mind about using painted fabric in my quilts.  I used to think that paint stiffened the fabric so much that I wouldn't like working with it, but Lyric's class has convinced me otherwise.  When these textile paints are heat set with an iron, they become quite pliable and they can add great texture to a background or an area I want to highlight.  

I still have two more weeks to go and lots more to learn, but the playing I have done so far has only encouraged me to do more.

And if you are still with me, thanks for the company!