Azure seas
Yarns for weaving at Melin Tregwynt
Have inspired some artistic activities with paint and thread.
Busy table - no paintbrush, so I had to improvise with found feathers and sheep’s wool.
“Thread painting” “ khadi paper, watercolour paint, variegated thread
…. but a colourful one, with this interpretation of the beak of a puffin.
Four layers of wadding in the trapunto on this one, but really difficult to see when the piece is photographed flat. There is a better impression of the volume in the next photograph.
Journal for October was an interpretation of the beak of an avocet.
Two layers of wadding in the trapunto shape.
Winter is in full sway, with decaying foliage lit by low-lying sun.
Stitching has however been on an autumnal theme, as part of our quilt group’s A3 challenge on the seasons. My theme is autumn and I wanted to get away from leaves, conkers, acorns and berries, lovely though they are. I brainstormed and the word that kept coming up was rain. What comes out when the rain comes down? Wellies and brollies.
Machine trapunto, machine quilting, machine applique, hand beading.
I printed a piece of white cloth with random rectangles ( half way down this post). Last weekend I painted it with a wash of acrylic paint and auditioned threads from the thread jar
for potential quilting.
This weekend I quilted it with twin needle straight stitching and stippling. My sketchbook is now feeling much more like an object that I want to use.
A quilt to finish the year with. “ Proper” patchwork made from two worn out shirts, a discarded calico curtain from a charity shop and backed with a fabric picked up at the bric a brac stall at a quilt show.
No photos of the full quilt as the light is too low today.
I have not made many quilts this year as I have been diverted back to clothes making. My younger son has difficulty finding shirts to fit his narrow shoulders and long, slender frame so I volunteered to make him some. Unlike women’s clothing, there is a little choice in patterns for men’s shirts, but several bloggers use Burda 7045, however I anticipated having to make many pattern adjustments, after reading an account of making it here.
Commercial patterns are not like quilt patterns. They are never perfect and always have to be adapted to an individual because human bodies are too variable. The instruction sheets frequently do not take account of modern sewing methods and advise cumbersome techniques and outdated interfacings. There is so much help on the internet to address these commissions and I followed tutorials about shirts from here and here.
The test shirt, with cotton lawn, digitally printed, bought several years ago from M Rosenberg and Son, went down well.
Version 2 is now cut out, with a longer armhole, removal of the darts on the front and a collar that extends further in to the open neck of the collar band. 2017 could be the year of the shirt.
Happy stitching everyone.
So the day I decide to take my camera out is the one where the fog doesn’t lift
but there are great textures to be seen up close
Luckily the sun was shining when I took these photos of the back the heart quilt
My relative’s suffering post-stroke has now ceased and we had her funeral on Friday. Very proud of my son, who even though very distressed, was able to get up and speak about her positive impact on his life.
Shuffling through some old hand-dyes, ( in the same colour palette as here ) and discovering some leftover hearts from the Alice quilt, led to an urge to get them stitched together.
Appliquéing the hearts on the tray-dyed cloth
Composing the 7 inch blocks on he temporary design wall.
There was not enough of the variegated solid ( a contradiction in terms?) so I had to fudge the edges a bit and lose some corners, therefore not one for the perfectionists I think.
Not bad for a sunny afternoon. Five years since the cloth was dyed, so hopefully the quilting will be faster than that.
On the design wall - or ,more accurately, the design floor, auditioning half square triangles with some appliqué blocks ( I think based on a block from Piece O Cake) that i worked on in Australia, nearly two years ago.
Stitching on the sturdy featherweight.
I can see now that the middle block in the bottom row is missing a piece!
Auditioning in black and white shows a misplaced square in the topmost right, and insufficient contrast in a few of the sashing squares.
Auditioning a border of strips, which I think is too busy. It needs some plain fabric between the squares and the strip border.
Still discovering functions on my camera - black and white with a hint of red.
