Challenge 52: "Border Crossings"

After a VERY long absence (sorry--I don't know what happened to me last year) I'm back in full force! I loved this challenge; it was very educational, made me really think, and inspired me to create something. I don't know how well I succeeded in meeting the goal of creating a "color field" piece, since I'm not sure I fully understand the concept, but I thoroughly enjoyed working on this wall quilt that I'm calling "Border Crossings."

I couldn't figure out how to make the blocks of color seem "blended," so I gave up on that and tried to sort of confuse the eye instead. I had to REALLY fight myself not to quilt this piece to death (my usual MO) because of the "flat texture" look of color fields. Since there's not a lot of quilting, some of the fabric looks a little "loose" (I'm not really sure how to describe it--you know that slight wrinkly effect you get between quilting lines?) so I'm going to starch and iron it as soon as I find my spray starch (long story).

Your comments are greatly appreciated! Michele

Fun Fiber Fish

I've been busy getting ready for surgery tomorrow and the subsequent hospital stay (the important tasks, you know: preparing and packing hand-stitching work and my drawing supplies), so I won't be able to make a new piece for FFFC #43. I do have something on hand, though, that I'm submitting:

This is one of the first mixed-fiber, embellished pieces I ever made when I started working with fabric about 3 years ago. I had painted and quilted the background fabric as a way to practice both, and I hate the thought of wasting anything, so I started covering the fabric up. The piece is 9"h x 11"w.

The fish was stamped with paint onto fabric using a hand-carved stamp, stitched, then cut out as an appique and applied to the background. Beads were stitched over the fish and onto the background fabric as "bubbles."

The seawood is free-form cut fabric strips stitched down the center, and fun-fiber yarns are couched over the bottom area and through the top as seawood.

White coral (left) is made from beads stitched onto the background. Purple coral (right) is thread lace created by stitching on water-soluble stabilizer.

The jellyfish is loose strands of yarn with fabric stitched over the top to hold them down.

The edges are finished with zig-zag stitching; I think I could probably block this to get the bottom to lay straighter, but it just hangs in my craft room to make me happy.

Woven Bird

I had a tough time with this challenge; I just couldn't wrap my mind around all the variables. I have been wanting to try fabric weaving, though, so I went in that direction. I chose the colors blue, green, and orange.

I printed a photo of a bird I painted a while back onto fabric, then wove that with some hand-dyed orange fabric. I lightened/darkened various orange squares with fabric markers, and recolored the bird. I thread-painted the bird and zig-zag stitched the edges of the woven strips.

This piece is very small--6"x6"--since it will serve double-duty as my weekly 6x6 journal square:

Although I ended up liking the green "corner caps," I originally added them because I have a terrible time folding over fabric from the back to make a self-binding; I can never get the corners correct and always end up cutting too much fabric. If anyone has any tips on how to do that, I would appreciate it :-)

I'm not thrilled with the end result, but I did enjoy trying out the weaving technique and will do more of that.

Michele

Challenge 40: Milk--It Does a Quilter Good

What a fun challenge! I knew right away that I wanted to use this milk carton, since I love the colors:

The red, white, and blue colors were easy to work in, but I wasn’t sure how to work in the white & black of the cow “print.” Anyway, here is the result:

I like the finished result, but my vertical and horizontal lines are off somewhat, I guess because of the stitching; I definitely learned something about when to use extra stabilizer. I may go back and do some quilting to the piece, especially on the red “tablecloth.” This piece is 14"x15".

After The Storm

This piece started with a picture I took of a baby bird after it spent the day, with its parents' very vocal encouragement, learning to fly across the back yard. It finally managed to make it to the top of the fence, and I was able to snap a great pic.

I photoshopped the picture to create a rainbow set of birds, then printed it onto fabric. I used trapunto to make the birds puffier and gave them some texture with thread painting, then sandwiched and quilted the piece and touched up the eyes and beaks with paint.

This is a small project (10" x 12") and was intended to be a quick project, but it took longer than I thought--that's ok, though, since I had fun with it!

Ganymede Trumps Jupiter

This is my first group challenge, and it was a blast! The piece is 18x20" (I can never remember--do you list height or width first?) and I think I'm going to call it "Ganymede Trumps Jupiter."

I ran across a NASA (copyright-free) photo of Ganymede, one of the moons of Jupiter, and was fascinated by its textures and colors (I'm sure it was color-enhanced), so I decided to replicate it by stitching painted Tyvek to fabric and shrink-melting it. It looked a little lonely on its own, so I found a picture of Jupiter and used hand-dyed fabric and acrylic paint to recreate it. I took some artistic license with this piece; Ganymede is MUCH larger, proportional to Jupiter, than it should be, but I like it that way. The photos are a little misleading; they show a sparkly (star-filled?) background because I used clear invisible thread for the quilting, but it's not nearly so obvious in the real piece.

This is the first art quilt I've created in a VERY long time, and I'm thrilled that the challenge pushed me toward creativity. This was exactly what I was looking for when I joined the group! Please feel free to offer critiques.

Michele