Recycle "Keys"

I finished this FFFC on time but was leaving for the IQA quilt show in Chicago and didn't have time to take a photo and post.

For the background I used a muslin machine practice piece. The hotel "keys" my husband made holes in them for me to sew them on...old car keys and even an old skelton key..and a couple of old buttons. We were following our grandson Jack around for his college Tennis... he's in his first year at Lake Superior State. Maybe I should have named it Keys to Tennis!! Size is 9 x 17"

Janice Simpson

challenge 19

Party time was made from a collection of beer caps collected by my son in law. He loves micro brews and wanted to save the caps in a way that he could hang on his wall near his home computer. I quilted a fabric sandwich first then added the caps with holes punched in them and added large beads in between the caps. It was a fun project and he appreciated the time that I spent to make it. Great Challenge

Leave No Trace

When we are camping, we are always told to leave everything as though we had never been there. We always take a bag a clean up our camp area before we leave, sadly, often leaving it cleaner than when we arrived.

I took a picture of the desert near Borrego Springs, CA and enhanced the color. I then extended the horizon with similar fabric. After slashing and inserting strips, I collaged several "found" items - bottle tops, corks, Cal Trans fencing and some odds and ends.

Spring is in the Air!

16" x 15"

This is the season which seems to take forever to get here, and then is over too soon! The spring was torn from an old school notebook and touched up with some green paint. The styrofoam balls were left over from last month's challenge, with fabric paint used for the buttons and carrot nose and some twigs for snowman arms. And while I started. this time, with a square, I framee it with some stuffed polar fleece like a frame cut from a big snowball.

Challenge 19 - Journal Cover by Joanna Strohn

Front cover: 8" x 10 1/2"
Fits a standard composition journal

I didn't think I'd be able to participate in this challenge as I'm busy making samples for classes I'll be teaching. However, Friday night (when all the shops were closed, of course) I discovered that I had mismarked one of the projects -- a journal cover. The inside was finished but the outside was just a tad too small ... I'd marked the wrong journal. Gnashed teeth!

I decided to make lemonade. Grabbed my container of scraps that had fusible on them. ("Always keep your scraps," I tell my students, but I'd decided I'd better do some clean-up in the studio and these were going to the garbage.) Looked for inspiration. Leaves, of course!

Started cutting leaves. Decided to make this a practice piece for some thread painting and free-motion quilting. Couched a yarn scrap for a stem.

The thread painting is inspired by Ann Fahl, the journal cover technique is from Jake Finch, and the leaf quilting motif was from a recent workshop by Frieda Anderson.

This was fun, educational, saved some scraps from the landfill, and will be more ammunition when I tell students to never throw anything away!

I always appreciate comments!

-- Joanna Strohn in Tucson, Arizona

Objects: Lost & Found by Penny Irwin

8.5" x 11"
Classified ads from a newspaper glued to cheesecloth and appliquéd to a sew & flip base.
I was going for the look of a neighborhood message board that used to be outside a small local grocery before WalMart came along.

Originally I thought to list on this message board things I see when I walk; "Lost" many trash objects. And "Found", signs of Spring and returning life. This proved overwhelming.
Objects lost and found are a mixed message from the Earth. It still has business with us but we are hanging by a thread.

Lost:
one green bead
9 CO2 cartridges
thousands of beer bottle glass shards
uncounted aluminum beer cans and glass bottles
plastic soda straws
plastic cup covers
plastic chewing gum container
3 single gloves, no matches
nails
plastic coated wires
1 single shoe
sunglasses with one lense
Arrowhead mountain Spring water bottles
cigarette butts and empty cigarette packs
2 children's lunch boxes
several short lengths of plastic pipe
a dust pan, ironic?
3 Christmas trees
several tires
road kill fawn, tossed into wild roses.
Black plastic garbage bags filled with leaves and grass clippings (yes, I forced myself to look)
chunks of broken cement, brick and sod
piles of black asphalt and red cinders
Paperback: "Riddley Walker" (good book)
pair of children's mittens, placed together on a large rock

Found: Many familiar birds, insects and animal tracks. (It was all I could do to remember the trash) Found: the willows have returned to life. They have survived many fires and drought years. They once stood as single trees and now are a dense mass of sucker growth; taller and more massive each year. They might one day be single trees again.

Green flowers

I finally was able to finish another piece. I am a packrat anyway never throwing away the smallest piece of fabric. I made 'flowers' from old pop tabs that I colored, used buttons for their centers and twist ties for the stems. The leaves are from an old Christmas decoration. The background is all snippets of fabric I just couldn't toss and it came in handy for this challenge.

Challenge #19 Rhoda Forbes

I am posting my 'something from nothing' challenge. On the urging of a teacher I went to the Salvation Army and purchased old clothing. This piece is made from snippets and pieces of that old clothing. The piece depicts some of my favorite things.
I had hoped to have it stitched etc., but just haven't had the time, so am posting it in it's raw state.
Thanks for the challenge Wendy.
Rhoda

PAINTED LEAF

This piece is about 18" square. It was one of my first attempts at making an original art quilt about 4 years ago. It was moldering in a closet with some other "failed" attempts. I brought it out and attacked it with paint after reading "The Painted Quilt"by Laura and Linda Kemshall. I painted the leaf with two colors of metallic paints and the body of the quilt with some acrylics mixed with textile medium. It made the leaf and the quilting pop and greatly improved the quilt so that it is no longer bound for the trash. I will note that the painted areas are now pretty stiff so using the acrylics prior to quilting probably wouldn't make for a pleasant quilting experience.

Thanks for any comments. I'm snowed under with work for the next two months so won't get to comment like I usually do.

"Spring Reflections"

For this months challenge, we were to use recycled materials. I have chosen an old pair of jeans with a hole in the knee, scrap fabric from a shirt I made last year, plastic orange grid from an orange sack, foil wrappers from chocolate eggs, a couple of unused pieced rectangle I had laying about, some blue tulle, and a bit of gold fusible foil. I wasn’t sure how I would combine these items, so just started laying them about until I liked what I saw. The colors remind me of green hills, orange poppies, and reflections in a blue pond.

My husband suggested that the bright green pieced rectangle seemed out of place. I added turquoise squares on top of it to relate it to the lower pieced square.

I am deciding whether I should put a binding or a facing.

Update April 3, 2008: I have decided to bind the quilt with blue chambray, and I have updated the photo.

There is a Hole in the Ozone

There is a Hole in the Ozone

This challenge was a lot of fun for me, I had been saving a container made from corn just waiting for some way to use it for the “Go Green” challenge that Quilting Arts is having. This was the push I needed to get started. I spent Thursday night in the kitchen with the fan running burning away on this poor piece of plastic having too much fun! When I had finished with this I went of a quest for materials digging through my husbands shop trash can. I came up with several products we are using on our screen porch project. So here is a little diagram of what was used where.

The Sandpaper was really fun to paint, and I loved the texture of it, however it was difficult to use from a practical point of view. The quilt is the required 5”x5” for the “Go Green” challenge, which for me is way out of my comfort zone to work that small. I learned a lot on this challenge – thank you Wendy!

PS: I took the photo of the quilt off this posting as not to disqualify it for the Go Green Challenge. It can be seen by our members on the group site. Thanks Cynthia for the instruction.

Cosmic Whirlpool

I don't often do abstract but this challenge seemed to call for it. The fabrics are all leftovers from various clothing projects and include velvets, rayon, polyester blends and even some cotton. The wire ribbon is off my Christmas present from my SIL. The beads and sequins are from my "loose stuff" jar and the driftwood is ancient juniper from my yard. The large silver starfish is a souvenir from my one trip to IQF in Houston in 2004.
The entire piece without the sticky out parts is about 24" in diameter.

ren's rags

The finishing here still to be done includes some quilting and beading and figuring out a hanging device, but this is pretty much it. The overlay is silk organza with embroidery and beading from a silk dress that I had picked up at a church sale somewhere. The base is many of the labels that I had taken off the many men's ties that I have taken apart for their silk and wool.

I was keeping the labels in a little bowl, knowing that I would do something with them one day. And then this challenge came up and I immediately pulled out the bowl. I spent an entire day laying out the labels onto fusible batting, then ironed them down. I need to quilt and embroider over the organza to hold the labels in place for the long run.

I call this piece She and He in 1950. It is 14 inches high by 10 inches wide, so far. The hanging device might make it longer.

Self-Portrait?

This one was fun! I started off with the background, which is a poorly done machine quilting sample piece, made out of scrap fabric to begin with. Except I decided to use the former back side (with all the eyelashing and bad tension) as the front - the other side looks much more normal. I turned the sides to the new back and stitched them in place for binding, trimmed the length and added leftover binding from a previous quilt to the top and bottom. I took thread snips from the wastebasket next to my machine and couched them in place around a previously stitched circle. Then I added all of the fabric covered buttons from the box given to me by a friend of my mother. The facial features are scraps from the floor, covered with a blue veggie net and zigzagged in place. And in place of hair, I added a tiara created from scrunched up aluminum foil and stitched down.

Finished size is 8.5x11". Everything in it was here in my sewing room.

It may not look exactly like me, but I certainly feel like this some days. If you think of anything else that it needs, let me know. It makes me smile!!

Marilyn Rose

Wetlands

OK, I can't wait any longer... y'all have done such a great job of taking this challenge and making it work! I'm amazed at the ingenuity and variety of materials in these quilts! The biggest danger of this challenge is that none of us will ever throw anything away, ever again! One quilters trash is another's treasure!

Part of this challenge was generated when I started looking at the mesh bags fruit and veggies come in. Now what can I use that for? I tried using them as an overlay, but they were just not dense enough to make an impression, but I still kept about 10 of them on my design wall. One day I was absentmindedly twisting one around my finger and then I got it.

The cattails are twisted veggie bags, ends sewn together and soft sculpted, then hand sewn. The stems are needlepunched yarn, and hand dyed fabric (background and leaves, piping and binding) was leftover from another project. And the medallion is from a wind chime that died on my deck during our hard windy winter. I added some bronze paint for patina.

Comments, of course, are welcome!

Making Tracks

I just happened to have some Easter egg foil laying on my table, and as I had experimented with it before, thought I might try some more. I dug into my stash of chocolate foils, and started to play. The inner layer was sew-in interfacing. I also found a piece left from the previous experiments, so that got added to the layout. The 2 chicks seemed to want to go into the picture, so they did. I decided to lay a piece of bridal tulle on top, (left from some work for a wedding). In previous experiments, I sewed directly on the foil, but when using machine patterns, the foot made train tracks. the tulle knocked the shine back a bit, and when I stitched it, helped it from getting the extra marks.



The piece from before already had some stitching on it, so when I started stitching round the shapes, I decided to go with at least one of the patterns; a more complicated feather stitch. It was serendipity since they look like little bird footprints! So, I carried on with this throughout.



I sewed round all the shapes, but the birds. Then I cut a piece from a silvery coloured plastic shop bag for the backing. I went round the birds, and then more of the shapes, and then decided to go for broke and try some quilting. I also edged it with a sort of satin stitch, but it didn't work as well as on fabric.



Along the way, I decided it had to be called "Making Tracks"!

Loose Threads

Those tangled loose threads when the fabric comes out of the dryer are so pretty...just had to use them somehow!

This piece is postcard sized...5 x 8" and uses the wads of thread, bits of ribbon and trim and machine "lace" and quilted down with metallic thread to create a colorful mess!

Cynthia

Lost in Flight

this MADE me realize I keep far too much 'stuff...junk'...

Spring is here, with little flowers trying to bloom, lots of birds... some to stay, some in transit. The right side of the piece is to depict the startled flock that takes to the air, the others are smaller.... higher up...and more right. In their haste, feathers fall, I pick them up.....here they are. The orange and the yellow are from the same species [by the shape], and the blue from the Stellar Jay. A small bit of 'fluff' lies in the grass below. The flowers are made from those plastic rings that keep a pack of cd's from moving about, I cut them in half and stitched them down on a small piece of silk. The grass in the front is painted dryer sheet, and on the left... right in the corner is a piece of that plastic found as a divider in the sushi take-out tray. By the way those 'birds' on the right were going to be 'inchies' but I couldn't be bothered. Too fiddley.

I should add that the background is Dupioni silk. I love to quilt on it and have to confess I did all the quilting first.... except on the right side.

Everything is something that would have been/should have been thrown out or left on the ground if I wasn't such a packrat!!

Comments welcome and appreciated.

Window Wonder

This piece is "painted" using recycled clean-up paper towels from my fabric painting sessions.

I have included a picture of the picture in progress, along with the 'pallet'. I tore the shapes freehand and placed them on the painting, lightly glueing the very edges as I went along.

The pieces blend into each other seamlessly and look like all one piece...amazingly fun!

This was so interesting and fun to do, I will absolutely do this technique again!

Comments welcomed (and appreciated!) as always...Cherie

I actually completed several recycled collages this last week for Fiber Art for a Cause and I think they meet the criteria for this challenge.

The one posted is What Flower Is This - it started with a scrap of fabric as the background and I frayed the edges. Then I added satin, torn paper pieces, netting, plastic curtain rounds, and embroidery thread --- all stuff I had laying around. Lately I've enjoyed incorporating paper into my quilts - there's such a great selection of papers that the scrapbookers use.

It's 7x9 mounted on an 8x10 mat.
Kathy Angel Lee