BLOG 471

Blog 471

I started to apply and sew the iron-on bias binding along the appropriate pattern lines and then decided to make a slight alteration to the lower part of the basic design. I was happier with the simplicity of the final attempt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

      Bias binding start

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

       Bias binding finish

I added some decorative stitching to the background colour for texture (Note to self: it would have been easier to do these before the bias binding was applied!!). Once this is bound, it will be ready to hand over.

The city of Chester is over the border in England and only 14 miles away from where we live in N Wales. We visited it yesterday for two reasons. The Christmas Market was the first reason. Now I don’t usually think about Christmas until Dec 1^st and I avoid shops and shopping like the plague until then. But we were meeting up with some special friends and I have to say that the colour, the smells, the hustle and bustle, the brilliant busking and the magical atmosphere made it all amazing. I finally caught the full Xmas spirit when it started to go dark and all the Xmas lights came on; it was really lovely. And I have to say that the imaginative and talented busking beat the usual Xmas’s dirges in the shops hands down! No I don’t want it to be Xmas every day, nor will it be a blue, blue Xmas without anyone, and let’s have ‘here it is merry Xmas’ when it is actually here!

The second reason I went to Chester was to see the Knife Angel. Sculptor Alfie Bradley created the Knife Angel along with the British Ironwork Centre in Shropshire. It was created and exhibited to raise awareness of knife crime in the UK. It is also a memorial to those young lives and it gives us a chance to reflect on the grief that knife crime causes families and communities. Over 100,000 bladed instruments (flick knives, pen knives, machetes, samurai swords, kitchen knives) were collected in amnesties by all 43 UK police forces and they all had to be sterilised and blunted before work could begin. That’s the information from the brochure. On a personal level, I found it a very emotional experience and I was overwhelmed by the size of the sculpture and the vast number of weapons used. The exaggerated face of the angel is studying his equally exaggerated hands as if to try and comprehend why they would want to pick up a knife and inflict damage on another human being. Well done to Alfie Bradley!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     Knife Angel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

View 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

      View 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

View 3

 

And finally, I have some new furniture for the bedroom; just another place to display quilts as far as I am concerned!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New furniture

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BLOG 470

Blog 470

And now for something different as the saying goes! I have been invited to make a small wall hanging to go in the United Reform Church in Upton. It is a ‘thank you’ to the church community for allowing Chester Ps&Qs to hold their exhibition there last year. It is a bit late in being done but, after a prompt from the vicar to the committee, I was asked if I would be willing to make it. I like a challenge so I heartily agreed. Now that my creative project of painterly pansies is underway, I felt I could now concentrate totally on it. I took a couple of days to create the design and drew it with a reverse applique method in mind. In that method the design is constructed of holes that would be cut out and filled with colour. So far so good!

 

 

Pattern

 

I started to audition fabric too, although none of these were used in the end.

 

             Auditioning fabric

 

 

I traced the design onto a fusible layer and ironed it onto the WS of a black fabric. I used a small rotary cutter to cut cleanly along the straight lines before using scissors to cut into the corners. And then disaster struck! I cut across one of the radiating lines and the piece was ruined. Grrrrr! Without any delay, I changed the method from reverse applique to the traditional stained glass method with bias binding.

               Disaster!

 

Here is the sequence showing the progress so far using the revised method, where the design is drawn onto the WS of a foundation fabric and the colours are added in sequence to the RS. I wanted it bright and colourful for impact and also so I would enjoy working on it! Colour makes me happy. Here’s the sequence.

 

            Progress 1

 

 

          Progress 2

 

 

          Progress 3

 

 

            Progress 4

 

 

            Progress 5

 

 

             Progress 6

 

 

            Progress 7

 

          Completed colour

 

The colouring-in of the shapes with fabric is complete now. What I have to do next is apply and stitch the bias binding tape in place to make this look like a stained glass window.  I think the success of this project is down to the colour choices and these are the sorts of fabrics I have in my stash to enable me to do this. I am happy with the project so far!

 

           Fabric palette

 

 

 

 

 

BLOG 469

Blog 469

My thanks to those who sent emails to say which poppy they preferred; it’s always good to receive feed-back on these occasions. As it happened (and perhaps fortunately for me!) everyone said they preferred the pansies made out of strips and that is the method I have chosen to proceed with! This will be an on-going winter project, fitted in between other items I have to make. Now that the decision is definitely made, I can pursue this at my leisure and post pictures when there is something different to see and progress has been made.

 

 

             Painterly pansies

 

 

And in the spirit of ‘waste-not, want-not’, I cut up the fabric created with circles and created smaller pansies for a cushion front. I chose to appliqué them on a slap-in-the-face fabric for impact and I was delighted with the effect. Decorative free-motion stitching was added to hold down the small pieces of fabric and to complete the over-all effect. This will be one of four I have made for someone who ordered some ‘art’ cushions from me.

 

                Recycled pansies

 

             With stitch

 

 

Now that the pansies are underway, I decided to assess the progress I had made on the foundation pieced scrap quilt, yet another project in progress! It’s all very well slamming fabric under your sewing machine, but it helps to know where you are going with it. This visual feed-back helps to keep you going and gives you some idea of how far you have still to go! And just to remind you, I am sewing random width strips onto a foundation paper. No preparation is needed; all you need is one straight edge which helps to straighten the previous seam allowance as you sew. Once the excess fabric is trimmed away from around the outside edge of the paper, the paper (perforated by using a small stitch) pulls easily away.

 

               Foundation piecing

 

 

As my strips got smaller, I cut the papers in half vertically so I could carry on using them! This gives me more scope with the lay-out too.

 

             Review on design wall

 

 

I thought I had come to the end of my scraps and so I tidied up the remaining ones in bags, the short ones seen on the left and the longer ones on the right. I really thought I had finished and certainly didn’t want to cut any more fabric because that would have defeated the object of using scraps.

 

             Left overs

 

And then, when I was searching for other fabric, I found my ‘dump’ drawer! This is where I dump fabric after any project and forget about it until I have time to sort it out. I had obviously forgotten about it almost forever! So there is more fabric to use up although a lot of it is on the light side and I try to stick to mediums and darks. This is another on-going on-going on-going project!

 

 

            Dump drawer

 

And finally, I am delighted to show a picture of Marion Hughes’s box which was shared with me by a mutual friend. Marion, who is in her mid-eighties, made the box from scratch as part of her City and Guilds course. It is really lovely, and the applique on the top and sides is splendid. Well done Marion!

 

 

            Marion’s box

 

 

 

 

BLOG 468

Blog 468

 

I am definitely in creative mode now and I had a fancy to work on pansies this week. At the moment this is just playing and the process is explorative so you could call it a fact finding mission. I have created quilts with fused fabrics many times before, the first time probably 18 to 20 years ago, but I still need to be comfortable with the process so the time spent playing is invaluable. So I surrounded myself with art books/cards/sketches, I dug out fabric already fused and left over from other projects and I prepared small pieces of batik in the colours I thought would be useful. Finally, a simple pansy pattern was drafted and I was ready to start.

 

 

             Inspiration

 

            Left overs

 

               Pattern 10”

 

              Fusing fabric

 

             Fusible on WS

 

After trimming away the un-fused strips of fabric which can be clearly seen above, I made a decision to work entirely in circles. The whole idea of this process is to be painterly and to allow the fabrics to blend one into another so a variety of colour and tones is essential. Here is a sequence of pictures to illustrate my progress.

 

            Circles

 

                Pansy

 

              Background?

            Another palette

 

             Progress

 

 

And then I had a break and came back refreshed the next day. In the meantime I had been thinking! This is inevitably a dangerous process as it usually involves under-mining the progress of the day before! I had started to question the virtue of using circles and I decided I wanted to make the pansy look as though I had used brush strokes to ‘paint’ it! This led to another play day, this time using strips cut with pinking shears. Here is another sequence of pictures to show my progress.

               Alternative method

 

 

           Pansy

 

             Comparison of methods

 

                 Pansies and buds

 

 

At the time this blog is posted I have no idea which method I prefer nor how I will choose to continue. Perhaps I need to play some more!