Class with Maureen van Dam

Merry Christmas and I hope you all got what you wanted. Two years ago I spent Christmas day sewing with my Mum. We decided to do the same again. My girls are both in Sydney so there was only us to please - and that's what pleased us. This is what I finished.


I took a class with Maureen van Dam recently. What a lovely lady! She first came on my radar many years ago with a quilt in The Big Quilt show at Northart. It was a quilt she made with fabric she had brought from her homeland of South Africa. There was something about that quilt that I remembered it all those years. It was the clever way she had put the African fabrics together that just shouted Africa to me. It was more than just the fabrics. Anyway, her work is quite different now but still that same sense of design. She said that she didn't know what I was doing in her class, what with my recent win in the Dorothy Collard Challenge. Believe me, I've still got a lot to learn!

Flowers and leaves painted on plain white cotton

Fusible web applied, cut out and appliqued on to one of my hand painted fabrics. (Apologies for the blurry photo)

The background was quilted with a leaf design and curls.

Inserting the zip

This is how I prefer to insert zips for cushions. Cut the back in two pieces (halfway or not, whatever fits in the fabric I have.) Stitch the two bits back together with a normal stitch length for the first couple of inches, about 5cm. Then put in a lock stitch and increase the stitch length for most of the seam, finishing off with a lock stitch and normal stitch length. Press the seam open and pin the zip so that the teeth are right on the seam. Stitch around from the front with a zipper foot. I used a zip that was longer than I needed. When I got to the last part of the second side, leaving the needle down I unpicked part of the tacking stitches and pulled the zipper thingy (I'm sure it has a name) past the needle and then stitched the last part. Then it's just a case of unpicking all the tacking stitches and you have a perfect zip.

Stitching the last part of the zip insertion.

Why do I have a photo of me with Elvis? We had a 50s party at work. This is my 50s Walkaway dress. It doesn't scale up to a plus size well! I have no idea why 70s Elvis came to a 50s party. But the good news is that I had a lot of fabric left over, just the ideal colour to finish off my cushion. I've been itching to try this unusual finish for a cushion. I put the back and the cushion front wrong side together and stay-stitched all the way around. Then I applied a binding in the same way that you would do to a quilt. The quilt had quite a stiff stabiliser on the back and corners would never had turned out nicely if I had made this the traditional way.

Here is is without the pillow inside so that you can see how beautiful those corners are. It's going on my bed but I think this treatment would hold up to everyday use.

Wallhanging using Inktense monoprints

I see that I made the monoprints last November and blogged about the stencils in January. Well, it's only March and I've done something with them!

I decided to make a wallhanging and to print a backing for it. I made an overall tessellating pattern, something I learned from Lisa Walton's book. I knew how to make a tessellating shape (I teach it!) but I had never thought about making a repeating pattern. The pink is my backing fabric. You can see the repeat block but hopefully you can also see that those leaves form an overall pattern that repeats.

I wanted to do some bobbin work using my leaf pattern on the back. I tried out some beautiful soft bamboo thread that Lisa included in an order. It was just the right colour for what I wanted and created this lovely boucle effect when stitched but as you can see, I didn't get very far before I had to stop and rethread. I'll save it for something with more straight stitching. I used a crochet cotton instead, leaving the needle tension quite loose so that it creates a couched stitch. I used a variegated thread in the needle.

I also trialed some quilting in between the leaves. I was originally going to pebble the whole thing but I felt that it was going to build up too much thread and the printing and stencilling would be lost. The echoed curves are also in some of the printing so that seemed appropriate.

This is the bobbin work on the wallhanging. Since I was working from the back, I could follow the shape of the leaves in my backing design.

And I've done some of the quilting between the leaves.

Playing with Evolon

Ann from our Arty Farty group showed us the leaves she made at Quilt Symposium last month. She did a class with Betty Busby, who also had a quilt in the Living Colour exhibition on display at the Symposium and recently in Auckland too. I saw it in Sydney last year and it was a real treat to see it again! The standard of the quilts in that exhibition are quite amazing. One day I would like to enter a quilt for one of Brenda Gael Smith's juried exhibitions. I think I've got a way to go yet!

Anyway. we all loved Ann's leaves so this month she showed us how make them. Evolon is a product I hadn't heard of before. It's a non-woven product that is quite sturdy but has a soft suede-like feel to it. It is manufactured by the company that makes Vilene and Lutrador. It's quite amusing reading up about the product. They market it as a dust-mite proof cover for mattresses and other such uses. Us quilters print and paint it!

Here are the ones I made.

We stamped leaves using Lumiere paint on the back of leaves.

Added fusible web to the back and cut them out with a soldering iron.

Then painted them with a transparent paint.

Last year I made these free-motion embroidery leaves on Solvy. They may end up in the same project.

linoprints without lino

I had a few issues with technology this week so I'm actually staying late at work to do this! Blogging on an iPad is hopeless and my little netbook has finally given up. I think it needs to be put to rest.

How do you do linoprints without lino and sharp instruments? I saw this video by Derwent using foam and Derwent Inktense blocks (and you know I love my Inktense blocks) so I thought I'd give it a go on fabric. The only thing I did differently to the video is that I placed the fabric on the table and turned the foam over and pressed from the back of the foam. It worked well so I shared it with our arty farty group.

Very simple materials list: foam from Spotlight, Inktense blocks, bamboo crochet hooks instead of expensive embossing tools, rubber gloves and the one thing I don't have in this photo is the small spray bottles I picked up at the $2 shop.

I asked the arty farty group to bring white, cream or light coloured fabric. This is what we made.

 

Ann managed to get quite fine lines with a pencil.We started off just printing one colour.

Then Mel showed us a printmaking technique called a reduction print. Her Peace Lily is to the left. She started by pressing out the outlines and the white bit for the flower and printed yellow. Then she pressed out the yellow stamen and printed light green. The foam only takes so much abuse so rather than try to emboss the leaves, she just painted the background with dark green and then printed it. My attempt at a leaf is on the right!

Helen made this lovely woodgrain using two colours.

This was my reduction print. I did it in three stages. Embossed the main outlines, printed yellow, embossed the centre of the flowers, printed orange, embossed the whole flower and then coloured different sections of the the remaining print to get this effect.

This feather below has been washed. I think I lost a bit of colour. Derwent Inktense is permanent after it dries but you have to wet it on the fabric first. It dries so quickly when you print that I think it isn't reacting to the fabric fully. I'm going to try a spritz of water after printing and drying, then let it dry again to see if I get better colour-fastness.

Thread bowl

Remember this?

It became a little bowl.

Made by placing several strands of embroidery cotton floss between two layers of water soluable stabiliser and free motion stitching over the whole thing. The top photo shows how little stitching I did to get this quite sturdy bowl. I think a little less embroidery floss and more stitching would be better. Then I took a polystyrene ball, chopped the bottom off it and covered it in plastic wrap. Washed out the stabiliser and shaped around the ball with a little bit of Mod Podge and left to dry.

It looks like the wigs my Mum made for a fancy dress party my brothers went to in the mid '60s. Guess who they went as? Hint, it was my two brothers and two friends. :)

I have ideas for this technique which I hope to fulfill in the holidays. Only two weeks to go...

ATCs

I swapped these...

...for these.

Aren't they lovely!

This is what we did this month. You'll have to wait to see what I turn it into.

ATCs from fabric paper/paper fabric

Oh, what fun I've had with the arty farty group. We made fabric paper - or is it paper fabric? Then we turned them into artist trading cards.

The beginnings of my edition called 'Spring'. There will be 12 in this edition.

I made this by separating the 3-ply layers of pretty serviettes and glueing the top layer to fabric. I also added bits of text torn out of an old book, music or bits of old patterns or tissue. Then I painted it all with a thin wash of purple, added some Angelina fibres, couched some perle cotton, a bit of stencilling with sequin waste and added some washi tape.

I've got lots of them!

The next stage is to stitch it to felt and stiffener and then add the embellishments. My embellishment box has grown! I said I wasn't going to get into scrapbooking as my craft hoarding was enough of a problem already. These ATCs have let all that scrapbooking stuff sneak in by the back door! But it's fun and aren't those resin flowers cute?

Melted wax crayon art

Our arty farty group experimented with melting wax crayons.

I tried a fairly conventional one to start with. I glued crayons to each end and then melted them, tipping it to one side then the other. What I was aiming for was a sunset. What I got was a mess! I had also added dribbles of hot glue and I didn't think about the effect that would have. It meant that the wax was restricted to the channels formed by the glue. I also didn't think what would happen when the orange and turquoise wax mixed. It made muddy brown. I fixed it by using a small iron to add more turquoise to make a sea.

The spots of orange on the sea that look like goldfish are meant to be the sun shimmering on the sea! I've also added surf using acrylic paint and a silhouette of a yacht and palm tree using a black sharpie. This is about 8" by 16".


This photo with the crayons cropped out looks not bad!


I like this one on the black canvas better. Again, I've used white acrylic to add detail. 4" x 12"

And finally, I made this little 4" x 4" painting just by holding the crayon in front of the canvas to make the tree trunk. The leaves and bird were made by heating the crayon and dabbing it on. The apples didn't really work. I heated the end and tried stamping a circle.

Mixed media collage

One UFO finished!



Our art quilt group met last night and I just about finished my collage. I've got school work to do today but I was determined to get this finished - and it's done! Now I can concentrate on writing reports.

This was a fun project and used so many different materials a techniques.


The background was made by gluing paper napkins, pink tissue paper, paper doilies and text ripped from a very old large text book on to canvas. Some of it wrinkled which added a lovely texture

Then I painted it with a wash of orange and yellow acrylic paint and a few dabs of metallic gold.

I thought I made it too orange so I used the technique we learnt in our stenciling session and masked off triangles using masking tape and stenciled them with a white wax crayon.

Then I painted the music notes dandelion using acrylic paint. The white was useless and didn't have enough pigment for such small notes so I went over them with a correction fluid pen. I'd love to get some white acrylic ink like Geninne uses in her paintings.

The music was printed on fabric. I found an image of sheet music on the internet, downloaded and shrank it to a size that fitted in my design. Then I layered some of the brown paper bag 'leather' that we made in one of our earlier art group meetings with some mesh and zig-zagged the music fabric to it. There is stitching in this collage so it qualifies as an art quilt! (I think!)

The word 'easy' was made by printing out the word on paper and then cutting it and arranging it to where I wanted it. Then I drew in the cursive connections and traced it on to the back of some fusible web. I ironed that to the back of some Lutrador with a very cool iron. Guess how I discovered that you need a very cool iron! Fortunately I didn't melt the bit I was using. I then cut it out and ironed it to the canvas.
.
This lovely scroll was made by Jean using her cuttlebug. I glued some gold foil to it and hot glued it to the canvas. Thank you Jean and I hope you are having a great holiday in UK. By the way, Crewe is almost exactly where I thought it was. Cheshire isn't! My knowledge of the geography of England is not great, but then again, I am Scottish!

Finally I added this meander of eyelash yarn. I've attached it with 'No More Pins' glue. I may put a layer of PVA glue on top if I think it won't stay.

As I said, it was a lot of fun and the only thing I bought for the project was the canvas. So, if you have a supply of glues (I used four different types!), some paint, bits of paper, napkins, fabric and embellishment 'stuff', give this a go.