Feline fun!

Ok Week 3 (actually it took a week and a half - busy finishing off group quilt for the QGBI Button Up Challenge and it's amazing how long those final stages take) of the "Wake up Sandra by making postcards challenge" This week I decided to have fun, using a range of favourite print fabrics to create some more lighthearted stuff on one of my favourite topics.

This time the challenge elements were to a)draw the cat outlines myself; and b)use a selection of fabrics I've found difficult to use so far:

In the case of this first one the checkerboard fabric (overdyed a few years back) with the wavy stripes and batik plus gold highlights. The cat needed the narrow red zigzag outline to make it work.

This one's called Hiding in the Garden, something my cats do a lot of, especially when I haven't weeded and the jungle takes over; the background's a really mad Laurel Burch fabric that I love but have found difficult to use so far and the blue seemed to have just the right amount of patterning to provide the contrast.

The thrid one is another two-fabric one, called I'm not talking to you - I'm sure most cat-owners will recognise this behaviour:

The mad squares is another irresistible bright I found languishing in the "one day I will find a use for this" corner of my stash and it sort of made friends with the blue stripe.

The next one, called Chat en forme d'une poire (Cat in the form of a pear) is based on my white cat Bixy who has been on a diet for the last year but not sd's you'd notice (I'm going to have to take drastic measures soon). He likes to spend time sitting looking our of the window and is always there to welcome me when I get home. I've used one of my favourite Carla Miller (Rowan) prints for the background.

This one's a portrait of my cat Django, a sort of birds-eye view of him lying in front of the fire with his paws in the air, in the way he's spent most of the last winter. He really does have a lightning-streak belly and a lop-sided face. A couple of years ago he had a serious road-accident - a complex pelvic fracture, plus associated nerve-damage and I was really scared he would lose the hind leg and the paw with the black spot - thankfully he recovered and is now more of a home-cat than a roaming moggie.

My third cat, Pepper, likes to climb trees: I love the way cats go up trees really fast and then panic sets in when they discover it's not so easy coming down - most tackle the problem by doing a sort of controlled fall. Anyway this is a cat up a tree - not necessarily Pepper who's tabby rather than blue:

The final card uses a selection of fabrics - an African dyed damask, an indonesian batik, a commercial batik and a black fabric with holographic swirls I couldn't resist at a show (you know how it is). I hadn't had any squabbling cats so far so included the arched back hissing pose in this one, plus the tail end of cat disappearing off the scene familiar to cat-owners everywhere.

Now feel inspired to take it a stage further and create a hanging with wild prints in bright colours and black and white: I now have a list of projects to undertake as a result of doing these postcards: well worth while.

postcards week two

After long deliberation, and with a certain amount of trepidation, I have decided to include here the "what was she thinking?" ones, because I think you can learn as much if not more from failures than successes and I would certainly find it reassuring to dicover that someone else had failures too.

The week two challenge was to use scrim: I have a stash of hand-dyed scrim crying out to be used: I love its texture and its ability to soak up dye; I've also used some of what we in the UK call muslin and those of you in the US and Canada call cheesecloth.

WARNING: some of these are downright ugly/clumsy/amateurish but publishing them is important to me in coming to terms with my hangups about failure.

Sunday and Thursday I played with chenille, a technique I hadn't got around to earlier, the snake being Sunday, the abstract Thursday: my chenille technique improved between the two but everything I'd learnt in Liz Berg's class went out the window (lesson - even speedy projects need a bit of forward planning) in the abstract one:


Can't make up my mind about the Monday and Tuesday ones - broadly I think I haven't got there yet but there are things worth exploring, especially the way it's possible to layer scrim and stitch to get a painterly effect.

Wednesday's effort is cringemakingly embarrassing: a real "what was she thinking of?" moment.

I felt distinctly lacking in ideas that day and could only come up with the idea of contrasting scrim with satin, chucking bits on without care or planning: I didn't even realise how unbalanced the shapes were till I took the photograph. Apologies. I think I've learnt my lesson though.

Friday's piece was speedy, enthusiastic and exciting to do, and came together like a dream: I'm not sure where the dolmen shape comes from though I'm familiar with it coming originally from Oxfordshire/Berkshire which has its share of them. Saturday's piece, which I like a lot less than Friday's is a less successful attempt (it went dead on me) at portraying standing stones from the end of the lane where we once lived - the local legend was that a man his horse and his dog had been turned to stone by a local witch.




Of them, I think there's only one that I'm happy about at this stage (and I shall probably develop strong reservations about that as my standards improve. However even one makes the week worth while, and I learnt far more from week two than from week one when I played safe!

a change from what I haven't been doing

For some time now I seem to have been beset by inertia - part physical (my body really doesn't like the dark months of the year) and part mental (the vicious circle of not meeting challenges I've signed up for, feelings of failure and of the fear of failure if I try something new and so on. I am about to retire from paid employment and I have plans for all sorts of things I want to do, but I reckoned that if I wasn't careful I'd spend my life sinking deeper and deeper into the sofa if I didn't take myself in hand.

SO

I came up with an idea that seems to solve that particular problem. I have given myself a further challenge: to make a fabric postcard every day. This is the first thing I do each day after breakfast or after returning home from work. There's very little investment in terms of time and materials. I'm finding that for once I don't mind if something doesn't go as well as I'd expected: I can always do another one tomorrow! Ideas are churning and I'm working on other things too, including catching up on challenges, notably the Take It Further challenge. I'm also exploring new ideas and ways of doing things. Most important for me is that life is suddenly becoming more enjoyable.

I will admit I played safe with the first batch, which I started a week ago (week 2 is riskier because I have challenged myself more) - all use fused applique and free-motion stitching which are techniques I am familiar with, and are based on plant forms (mainly dead plant I still have to weed out of my garden - I hadn't thought of this as being symbolic till now but maybe it could be). Anyway - here are the first five, Thursday to Saturday in order:

more angelina!

Before I start on my latest angelina project, let me say thank you for all the e-mails and blog comments wishing me a happy 60th. I intend to take all your advice about enjoying life and making the most of things very seriously and have already had a week of celebrations (unusually for an introvert like me) and a couple of days recovering and getting back to normal. Just to quote one thing I was told (I think the quotation originally came from Garfield) "Life is short - eat dessert first!" - this appealed both literally and metaphorically!

On to the more serious business of the day: latest experiments in stitching. Using angelina was set as a challenge by the Self Expressions Studio group I'm a member of (a group of us who all took Myrna Giesbrecht's class at Quilt University). The earlier pieces have already appeared on this blog. However, after the deadline a parcel containing more angelina - which I was beginning to give up hope of getting - arrived, and I couldn't not play with it could I?

I began by making a large sheet of angelina that I could cut then fuse. I began by cutting off a piece of bondaweb (wonder under in the US) and laid strands of angelina in different colours across it, blending as I went to try to get an effect like a variegated watercolour wash. I put parchment paper over the top (I had already put some under the bondaweb) and ironed just enough to begin to bond the angelina, then turned it over to iron the underside enough to melt the bondaweb film (doing it this way presented less risk of overheating the angelina), then peeled it off the backing and laid it down on more parchment paper (ordinary baking parchment from the supermarket).

I planned to make up designs just using squares and oblongs, so out with the rotary cutter ruler and mat, and I had a number of squares and oblongs in different sizes, which I arranged on a p0stcard sized "sandwich" of backing fabric, wadding and base fabric then ironed down. Then it was merely a matter of finishing off with some stitching (Madeira Metallic 40 - a thread I love to sew with, which generally behaves itself well). This is the result:

I love the way the colours change with the light.

For the second one I began by taking a single larger square which I exploded (i.e. cut into pieces) then added some small squares at either side, fused the pieces, and finished off by quilting with the same thread as before.

I still have some angelina left over, and really fancy the idea of trying it in 3D (the cats, who have a knack of always choosing the right present bought me a heat-gun for my birthday) and of making some angelina beads. I've already been asked to do a workshop for my local quilting group on using angelina so I also need to design a few small projects that are flexible enough for those who prefer to design their own to do so. I'm looking forward to it - should be fun!

Whilst I love making postcards - together with journal-sized pieces an ideal way to experiment - I think I'm going to have to attempt something larger soon!

I been busy!

Finally got round to using the fantasy film/angelina fibre/cellophane pieces. They were the right size for postcards. Decided to use them to practice techniques/try out techniques new to me, adding angelina fibres and simple applique.
First I fused some pink angelina to the film, then stitched on the 'pod' shape which was cut from silk chiffon, stitched down, then I added a line of couched rayon/glitter chainette outside the shape, filled the gap between the two with dense free-machining, added beads, and free machine quilted the area outside the shape. I finished it with two couched threads - wool roving and glitter chainette (one of my favourite yarns for dyeing and stitching).



For this I fused opal white angelina to frame the film/cellophane snadwich, free-motion quilted, then couched down real twigs, painted with copper paint. It was finished by adding strips of silk/metallic organza instead of binding.



The third one had angelina fused in a sort of frame and the outside was free-motion quilted. The applique is a small piece of elaborately sequinned and beaded organza saved by a friend from a costume-deigner's cutting-room floor. The edging is hand-dyed cotton chenille.



The final one's my favourite. I stitched the film/cellophane shape to the base fabric, then added fused angelina outside this and free-machined it (took ages but it was fun!) Dipping once more into my stash of hand-dyed rayon glitter I couched this down to create the "leafy" shapes - did this in a "just do it" mood - atypical for me - sort of on a wing and a prayer. I decided to thread-paint parts of the leaves in some places, merely outlining in others. It needed something at the cetre, so spent an afternoon at my friend Judith's stitching down the seed-beads. Outlined in wool roving.

a few postcards

These are postcards I made as part of Myrna Giesbrecht's Self Expressions Studio class at Quilt University.

The first two are developed from some close-up photos I took of mosses. The first is made of layered cotton scrim, hand-dyed, cut and roughed up with a fingernail to get the soft blurry effect, plus hand-dyed wadding. The second is wadding on hand-dyed cotton, with couched rayon/glitter thread, also hand-dyed.

This one is based on English woodland, specifically Wytham Woods near Oxford where I grew up and where my brother still lives. It's made of fused hand-dyed cottons with free machine stitching.

The shiny bits in this postcard are fantasy film fused onto cotton, plus Angelina fibres melted cut and fused - the first (but not the last) time I've used these.

And finally, a piece I made for an exercise which was to take a favourite artist as inspiration. I got two for the price of one here - Henri Matisse's papercuts and the Welsh quilt artist Bethan Ash (who at times has also drawn on Matisse for inspiration). The shapes are cut freely from cotton bonded onto Bondaweb (same as WonderUnder) and fused onto the background, then quilted with various coloured cotton threads in vertical lines.

Altogether a lot of fun, and quick tomake.