PTA - Community Quilts

Our PTA group met yesterday at the home of Janice M and as always a day of fun and productivity.  We started with show and tell before an early lunch and heading down to the studio to work.

Kate makes lots of philanthropy quilts.  She inherited these cute little kid friendly blocks and coupled with her own fabrics, made this very happy looking quilt.

Kate is also an incredible marble-er and works a lot with whole cloth prints.  The quilting on this piece is wonderful...wish I had a close up to show.  It's not yet finished but looking good.

Gen joined our trio at our annual retreat to work on a project with us.  Kate, Mary and myself always do the same thing, have a community pool of fabric and a very "brainless" project. I'm embarrassed to say I still haven't finished mine but Gen brought hers to show...quilted and bound and looking great!

Lynne had the starts of a philanthropy quilt to show and also

a quilt she started at retreat...great piecing.

Linda has become a knitter but still the "class clown". While showing us her latest scarf, we were all reminded of the judges from years ago who wore the long wigs...so Linda ....you know the rest....had us in stitches.

So after lunch, it was downstairs to Janice's beautiful studio with lots of room to spread out and work.  We all brought 'already made' 9-patch blocks to be sliced down the middle in both directions.

We had enough to do 4 quilts.

On the wall they went ......

and the floor...to see the patterning and do a little tweaking.

We had sewers, pressers, talkers, supervisors, wine drinkers and just stand by and "gopher" this and that.

And the whole time, Janice's dog looking from the outside in.....longingly....to be part of our group!
Fun...fun...fun....Next meeting, we'll tie them and then present them at guild for the ongoing community quilt project. I'm linked to Nina Sayre's blog

Rusting with old bed springs

My friend Kate found this wonderful treasure in a woods near her....mattress springs and very, very rusty...

She had taken them apart...harder than it looks and then... gave them to her "rusting" friends.

So I'm experimenting, now that the hot weather is here and the time for rusting.

After I soaked the scarf in a vinegar and water solution, I went to town with the rust.

Why use a little when a LOT will do even better.  Will keep you posted.

A New Small Piece

I've been working on another small piece, this one to be mounted inside a mat board. 

I started with an image of an old window and added some silk noil on the left.  Noil is a real coarse silk that's very nubby; it takes a dye beautifully but doesn't print clearly because of the coarse texture....but the color worked so I used it.

 I thought I wanted to use a tree in front of the window so I silk screened the image using black textile paint. The image wasn't real clear which I liked in this instance.

 I also added some gold couching thread along the seam line,

stitching around the tree...

and some gold paint sticks on the tree for highlights. I love using paint sticks...they are so easy and give good results.

After quilting the piece, I used double stick carpet tape to attach to the mat. I like using mats for smaller pieces; it's an easy way to finish the piece - no binding or facing and ready to put in a frame.
Til next time....

Ink Jet Printing

I've made a lot of deconstructive screen printed fabric over the last couple of years and it's hard to know what to do with it.  It's a very busy fabric and sometimes hard to match with other fabrics. 

I haven't printed anything using my printer in a while and thought I might try and print on a piece - just to see what would happen. The piece was a little paler than the picture shows and I was hoping that some of it would peek through the ink jet print.

I found a couple of images in my files that I thought would blend well when layered. I took this photo of an old rock building in Waynesville

and this of an old train trestle in Athens, GA where my daughter went to college. I blended the 2 photos in Photoshop Elements. The most fun part is trying all the options for blending once layered; I usually use "overlay" which shows both photos equally blended but this time the option "Difference" was really effective.

 I used 100% opacity so I wasn't sure if it the fabric would peek through, but it did and I'm very happy with the print as a result...We'll see where we go from here. I'm linked to Nina Marie Sayres Blog

Sun Printing with Fiber Junkies

Fiber Junkies met last friday for a fun day of sun printing....the weather was with us and Val had set up her garage space into a wonderful work area. We had some interesting fabric to work on and used a variety of transparent paints.

You can see Val's hands here, painting her already dyed fabric with Set a Color and using several colors.

Leave it to Val to think of something really cool to do. Next she'll lay objects on top to block out the sun.

Even the smallest piece of fabric did not escape our hands.

We laid the fabric out on big boards as well as pieces of foam core and waited and waited for the magic to happen.

A variety of objects were laid on top; we found the heavier items that hugged the fabric worked best, although even at that, there were a lot of faint images.

These lacy ferns from Val's garden did give somewhat of an image even though they weren't snug against the fabric.

The yellow piece is Kates; she often does scenes which she can then add to and do her beautiful quilting on.

These piece used ferns...very successful and done on an already dyed fabric.

This plastic place mat turned out wonderful....haven't seen them in years but someone said you can still get this in tablecloth form at Walmart....looks like I'll be making a trip there soon.  What we don't use in sun printing, I think would work in deconstructive screen printing.

Gen had great success with leaves - her secret - press the leaves in a book for a week before to flatten them and before they dry out.  They were still moist but very flat when she used them to create this wonderful piece...of course we all had to have a turn with her leaves after that. This was probably the best piece of the day.

Gen - Sun Printing Queen for the day.

All in all, it was fun to play with friends, laugh at the misses and oooh and ahhh over the successes. We had all the right ingredients so I don't know where we went wrong.  This technique has always been a hit or miss for me...today was a "major miss"...But the one fabric that was beautiful - the fabric base used to cover the table - yummy.

The Woods

I've been working on some very small pieces lately.....They go together fairly quickly and I can manage to find little spurts of time to work.  I'm taking part in the Southern Highland Craft Fair this October and small is usually better. I'm also part of an online gallery - Galleribba which features the work of artists; all work must be 12" or smaller. 

For this piece - The Woods, I started with a lazer copy of a photograph of rocks.  I used an acrylic medium to coat the fabric, then laid the copy on top, piled books on top and let it sit for 24 hours.  Next I had to soak the copy/fabric in water and peel off the paper backing leaving the photo on the fabric...a little time consuming but I like the results.

I also had pictures of icicles I transferred to fabric with my printer and then cropped

I tried combinations of fabrics and some different images to screen on the rocks.  I screen images on clear plastic to lay over fabric to preview them. This one was of an old chair I really loved...but not good here.

This combination was too bold....

So I resorted to my old standby of trees to screen onto the rocks. I also added a face up in the corner. I dabbled a little green wash of paint on the rocks to pull in more green and outlined the tree with gold mylar thread for a little sparkle.

I did some screening on the strips - used lots of words.

And the finished piece.....I am linked to Nina Marie Sayres Off the Wall Friday