Flower Tower

Yesterday I received back a small quilt (30 cm square) that had been on the road for over 2 years. It's a good chance to take an objective look at your own work and I'm pleased to say that I'm still happy with it. It was made for the Seasonal Garden exhibit by the European Quilt Association (EQA) in which the UK was allocated Summer. The show made it's début at the Festival of Quilts, Birmingham back in 2014.

Since then it has travelled to Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, France (twice in different locations), Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Belgium, Latvia, Denmark, Finland, and Hungary. Oh that I could have gone with it!

The piece was made out of gelli plate printed fabrics. The background was machine pieced and free machine quilted with a pebble pattern. The flowers were made by stamping on flower patterns (using Hero Arts Magical Flower (CG284) as well as Layered Flowers (CL496), cutting them out, hand stitching on them and then layering them up and attaching them to the background with a large round bead. I also added sequins and beads. The flowers are only attached to the background by their centres so are quite 3 dimensional. I had been a bit worried about how they would stand up to all that travelling and packing/unpacking, but all was well with them.

It's lovely to have it back home again and just looking at it afresh has given me ideas for new work. It has also made me wonder if we will continue to remain members of EQA when the UK Brexits?!

September Journal Quilt

The year is galloping on towards the finishing line and we have now arrived at the last 4 journal quilts for the Contemporary Quilt Group that all have to contain a piece at least 1/2" square coloured orange after our previous colours of 4 purple and 4 green. The Contemporary Group also set the size at 8 x 10".

You are probably aware by now that I'm using tartan and tweed fabrics for my journal quilts this year, coming from Lochcarron Woollen Mill as well as from Fabric Affair.

 I'm trying to make my journal quilts look folksy which has been much harder than I imagined when I started. Techniques used are: hand quilting, raw edge appliqué with hand stitching, hand embellishing with beads and buttons.

The large yummy button you can see above came from Daytona Trimmings in West 39th Street, NY. We found this shop in the same street as our hotel and although still closed when we tried the door at 8.30 am on a Saturday morning, Neil came to the door and led me in. Such service and what a treasure trove the place proved to be! Highly recommend a visit if you should find yourself in New York.

June Journal Quilt

It's definitely not the weather for tartan and tweed but it is time to share my June journal quilt with you and it is made entirely of such materials. The challenge was set by the Contemporary Quilt Group and they set the size at 10 x 8". The other requirement was to add a small 1/2" square in a specified colour. For this month it was green. I set myself the challenge to use tartan and tweed (some from Lochcarron Woollen Mill and to do them in a folksy style. It proved harder than I had imagined to make them deliberately wonky!

The patterns are simple and I have used raw edge applique by hand stitching to add them to the background so these journal quilts are completely hand stitched (apart from the binding).

For me the most fun is added just the right vintage buttons and beads as embellishments at the end.

A Golden Moment

Yesterday was a bit of a golden day as I was told late afternoon that my La Linea d'oro (or Golden Line) wall hanging had won the 1st Prize in the Small Wallhangings section of the Quilt UK 2016 show held in Malvern. The show will open today and is on till Sunday. That would have been great news in itself but it was also rewarded with the Award for Surface Texture and Embellishment as well as a Judges Choice. 

You can read more about this quilt here on a previous blog post so I'll just mention that this is a compilation of the 12 journal quilts I made in 2014 and each individual square is sized 8 x 8". 

Above is a detail of one of those squares. The fabrics for the wall hanging were all painted on the gelli plate. Thus far my gelli plate printed pieces have been very successful for me (one even winning a trip to New York!) so perhaps it's time to return to the gelli plate and do some more, specially as I enjoy making the fabrics very much.

First though it's time to work on the quilt you can just barely see in the background of the picture above. I'm machine quilting it at the moment and yesterday at the last meeting of the Tweeddale Textile Group in Peebles I came across just the right hand dyed machine quilting threads to do so (from Oliver Twist). It felt like the universe was on my side and that feeling continued today when a deer crossed my path during the dog walk. It was very calm, hopped over the fence and sauntered into the forest. Before it disappeared our eyes met for a brief and very special moment.

I sometimes wish I could bottle such beautiful times so that I could take a sniff of it when things aren't going quite as well!

March Journal Quilt

 This is my monthly journal quilt for March. I'm doing these as part of the Journal Quilt challenge on the Contemporary Quilt Group. They determined the size at 8 x 10", portrait orientation and also stipulated that the first 4 months were to have a piece of purple fabric in it, at least 1/2" square.

 I made the decision to use tweeds and tartans for my journal quilts this year with a lot of hand stitching and embellishment. No one, I think, will doubt after all these years that I can make quilts in the traditional way so I have given myself permission to make these in a very untraditional fashion. No piecing but instead a lot of raw edge appliqué all held down with hand stitching.

As several people have pointed out I could have used my embellisher machine to bind all those layers together. However  that sort of misses the point. It was because I am so in love with the quality and feel that hand quilting gives, that I choose to do it my way. Most of the fabrics in this one came from a visit some weeks ago to LochCarron Woollen Mill in Selkirk. I was a bit nervous I wouldn't have enough fabrics for all my JQs this year so at last week's quilt show in Ingliston I was over the moon to find more tweeds. I probably have enough fabric now to make much more than 12!

Peace Journal Quilt

Let's start by telling you that this last Journal Quilt I have made for this year is in no way a reflection of what is happening today in our Parliament, for either one side of the debate or the other. Our MPs (Members of Parliament) are voting later on today, on whether or not to send in war planes to bomb IS in Syria (we are already bombing in Iraq). It's pure chance that I'm uploading this quilt today. It was made back in October and in fact, the decision to use the word PEACE for December's Journal Quilt was taken back in January when I compiled a list of words I wanted to use on the 12 JQs for 2015.

That said, this is the final word quilt for this year. The journal quilts I made were all for a yearly challenge set by the Comtemporay Quilt Group who set the size for the quilts this year at 6 x 12". I decided to dedicate each one to a word and thus used a horizontal orientation for them all. There will be a new challenge for 2016 but the details haven't been revealed yet nor have I decided whether or not I will participate. But if you are interested you need to be a member of the Quilters' Guild of the British Isles as well as of the Contemporary Quilt Group within that Guild.

Now for this particular journal quilt! It was made using bits of gelli plate printed (using stencils) fabrics that were raw edge appliquéd together and machine quilted. I added the circle which was made separately by putting snippets of transparent fabrics on a piece of background fabric, covering it with a transparent fabric and hand stitching the circle. It was machine appliquéd (using gold thread and a buttonhole stitch) onto the background and then beaded along the edges.

The letters for the word PEACE were cut from a sparkling, transparent fabric (with Bondaweb applied to the back). I used my Brother Scan'nCut machine to do this. They were machine stitched onto the background and also beaded as you can see on these detailed pictures. I used size 15 gold seed beads.

Finally I added my now usual signature in the form of size 11 seed beads around the edges of the binding. Sometime soon I will take a photograph of all the journal quilts I made this year.

Solitude Journal Quilt

It was a real autumn morning covered in cobwebs and mist. A new month has begun as has a new season. And it's also time to share my new journal quilt for September. These monthly journal quilts are part of a challenge set by the Contemporary Quilt Group. They also dictated the size as 6 x 12". I choose to use the horizontal orientation and to dedicate all my journal quilts this year to words.

As you can see I have left the word (Solitude) smaller than on my other journal quilts so far, because I liked my background so much that I didn't want to cover most of it up. This background was made using the smallest size gelli plate (3 x 5") as a stamp to get the different coloured areas while at the same time using wooden carved blocks (from Textile Traders) in the paint first.

Afterwards I stamped on the trees (also from a wooden carved stamp). The piece was then extensively hand quilted using running and back stitch as well as embellished with seed and bugle beads as well as sequins. The binding fabric was painted on the gelli plate too.

The word SOLITUDE was stamped onto a separate piece of fabric and hand appliquéd on. I'm now thinking about my next word!

 

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Zeitgeist Journal Quilt

As you will probably remember if you are a regular reader, I'm once again doing the Journal Quilt Challenge on the Contemporary Quilt Group. They required the journal quilts to be 6 x 12" this year and the choice was up to us to go horizontal or vertical. As I decided to dedicate mine this year to using words I went for the horizontal option. I'm enjoying selecting the words I want to use and for this month I went for a German word: ZEITGEIST.  Zeitgeist is " the intellectual fashion or dominant school of thought that typifies and influences the culture of a particular period in time"

I started raw edge collaging suitable imagery on a background fabric using Mistyfuse and then buttonhole stitched around each piece by hand. I used a wide variety of fabrics including many that featured clocks as, of course, the Zeit bit of the word stands for Time.  The letters were cut out of a Tim Holtz fabric which is entirely composed of clocks. I used the Scan 'n Cut machine by Brother for the cutting. The next step was to Bondaweb the letters down and I was so pleased with how the pattern from the background sort of merged with the letters. I would like to say it was planned but the truth is that it just happened!

I then added further embellishments by hand included a clock charm and parts from actual old watches for the clock hands etc. And needless to say I beaded both the letters and around the binding in what is by now my standard trademark for finishing journal quilts, as I have been doing it since 2004.

La Vie en Rose Journal Quilt

Another month brings with it another word for the journal quilt project I'm doing with the Contemporary Quilt Group. The group set the size for the challenge (6 x 12"), and the choice of whether to go horizontal or vertical was up to us. As I had already decided to use words as my own theme I went for horizontal. My word for March is La Vie en Rose. The weather conditions sadly don't reflect this at the moment as we are suffering gale force winds and lots of rain, with snow also forecasted for later on.

So it's quite good to be able to seek refuge into a rose-tinted world. Usually La Vie en Rose is translated into English as: "Seeing life through rose-tinted spectacles". A bit cumbersome and not at all romantic sounding, in my opinion though, unlike the French version! "In the pink" is also a suggestion. My own interpretation leans to: feeling like you are enveloped in rose petals" and that's the way I went with this journal quilt. The most famous interpretation of the words was of course in the song by Edith Piaf. You might want to listen to it as you watch these pictures.

I used a wide variety of rose themed fabrics and raw edge appliqué done by hand,  to make the background which I then hand stitched using running stitch as you can see quite clearly in the detailed pictures shown. The next step was to cut the letters from another rose fabric using the Brother Scan'nCut machine and machine appliqué them on. The fabrics have to be bondawebbed in order to use the machine so that helps with the appliqué! Little red size 15 seed beads were sewn onto the letters and size 11 ones around the binding.

I like how the letters sort of merge with the background and you have to pay attention in order to read the text. I found some yummy rose beads in my stash and they were sewn on as the finishing touch.

The 100 Fundraiser Day

Today is the big day! This is when the American artist Virginia Spiegel hopes to raise $10.000 for the American Cancer Society. Together with her other fundraising events in the past (and I'm pleased to have been a part of some of them) that will mean she has raised an astonishing quarter of a million dollars for this very deserving cause. You can find out how to take part here.

Basically the idea is that 100 fiber artists have donated their work and the postage costs to send it anywhere in the world to the first 100 people that contact Virginia for a link to donate $100 to the cause. Who gets which artwork will be determined by a random number allocator. You need the link from Virginia to donate and get the art. It all kicks off at 10.00 am Central Standard Time which is 4pm here in the UK. So at 4pm be ready to send that e-mail to Virginia to request the link!. Again, all the information you need can be found by following this link. The only other thing necessary is your credit card!

You will have seen all the detailed photographs before in the months leading up to this day but I'm now revealing the entire piece at the top of this post. It measures 8 x 11" and has a hanging sleeve on the back. Should the buyer want to frame the art piece, the hanging sleeve can be removed easily. The piece is called: Up in the Air.

All the artists were asked to contribute a piece of art with a retail value of at least $100. This piece is slightly larger than my usual journal quilts which sell for £125. As far as I can tell all the participating artists have gone out of their way to make their piece for this fundraiser way beyond the $100 value. You can see some of the fabulous art made on this Pinterest board.

I can't wait to hear where this piece is going and I'm also going to sit at the ready with my finger on the button so to speak to send Virginia an e-mail at 4pm sharp. Hope you'll do the same in whatever timezone you're living. Remember it's the equivalent of 10 am Central Time It's going to be mayhem in her inbox! I will of course let you know what happened tomorrow. Hope you too are getting ready to donate.

 

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