Showing posts with label quilting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quilting. Show all posts

Thursday, 26 January 2012

Green / Best-laid Plans

Of mice and men..
Got up very late, as not feeling well, and had bad dreams.. Nothing to do with the colour thing, which is proving pretty satisfying so far.  Not quite as good as my Week Of Trees last year, but still worthwhile.
Went shopping, and found these lovely plants in Morrison's car-park. Note the touches of red, which are inspiring, and thought-provoking.




Someone's tastes have changed



So, two more postcards of a recycled persuasion (green!).  Painted patchwork which I note has old pink blanket as batting..



By this time it was lunchtime, and I had my usual salad (note the red bits again, a theme emerges).
(I have much the same salad every day, but the cunning arrangement of the camera and the cropping of the image leads to an exposition of the colour theme.  Blue is going to be tricky) Note the 60s plate, rescued from the dump (green!)
Over lunch I finished reading this book, by Janet Twinn, which arrived on Monday from the Library in utterly timely fashion. It's an interesting book, and like all good books, much too short.  There are the usual "colour wheel" parts which I skim, and quite nice explanations of various printing, dyeing, and painting techniques, but the most interesting parts for me are the images of the work and the close-ups of technique and stitch.  The book itself is nice, too, having a solid feel, a rather nice cloth cover and good print quality.  I may actually buy it..
Back to the Best-Laid Plans.. I was intending to make small pieces of a saleable quality, several, green, maybe with a touch of red.. But when I got in to the workshop, the chaos was unfeasibly bad, so I had to tidy up, answer the phone a lot (sales, though..) and find a space to work in.  This took half the afternoon, so by the time I started I'd lost the thread, so to speak.. And I'd found this piece of printed fabric that is everything I had in mind except it's not small.  So I layered it anyway and started quilting it with lines in a smudgy green thread.. I have some ideas for more detail on this, more later.  I have decided that I'm not done with Green, so I'm extending it to tomorrow.

 Quilting in progress
 This small piece of screen-printed fabric qualified as a failure the first time around.  Interesting technique, which unfortunately isn't terribly nice when it's done.. Then over-printed with the moon and sky, which is better, but not quite...
Definitely improved by the addition of some sewing.  It will have more quilting and a red binding tomorrow.  It does have the merit of being small.. The little red tabs are a new idea.. I like them a lot.
Last of the day, some City Lights blocks
And a perfect beetroot leaf.
Oh, and John fixed the gas struts on the car, so no more stick-to-prop the boot.. Yippee!
Sleep well, more tomorrow





Tuesday, 8 March 2011

Week Of Trees - Day Two

Well, so far this has been fun and very productive. I had a nicely peaceful and very sunny day and got lots of quilting done. Yesterday's Pieced tree was made into a cushion (in progress on the machine here and finished above)








I find the preview window in Blogger almost unusable. Any hints about manipulating and arranging images would be gratefully received..

Images here of the quilting in progress on the Hedge piece shown yesterday. I tend to look at the back of the work to see where I have missed bits and to find out if the density is as I like it. (Frequent student question - "have I quilted this enough?" My invariable answer "No")

You will see that I have filled in the black border with an almost invisible quilting pattern (spirals) as I didn't want to detract from the colour. The rest is mostly long straightish lines (done free-motion to keep them loose and a bit wonky) around the Cow Parsley. None of the quilting follows the Hedge print. Quilt is now blocked on the table, as is the Red one from yesterday and my cushion. Very satisfactory.. I also made quite a lot of green tiger blocks for my background idea, photographed a lot of old sewing machine bits for my OSM site (see link) and drank lots of coffee. Tomorrow is a rest day, but I shall think, photograph, and lunch-in-the-pub...



This piece was my favourite from the first lot of hedge prints - the sunset was sort-of-accidental as I was demonstrating something else. I layered this ready to quilt - it will certainly lose a lot of the white edge..

Found 2 pieces of heavy Faux chenille in the box. Just looking...



Finally, the piece from yesterday blocked, trimmed, and ready to bind. It will be finished tomorrow...