And the Irish Cottage evolves....

Thought I would entertain you a bit with a glimpse at process. :)

The Irish cottage has definitely attracted my energy. It will be a long time in the production, particularly due to my travels, but one has to start somewhere.

This week I started working on fabric selection. You can see from the photo below that I do this in a very 'organized' way!

The shelves where I store my stash are over beyond the left of the photo. Basically I go through each cubby of fabric looking for possible candidates. There is actually some order in the seeming chaos. If you look closely you can discern the cottage walls and roof are on the ironing board, the sky/ocean are directly under it. The rest of the groupings on the floor begin to capture the various shades in the grasses and fields. The makings of a gravel road on the tip of the ironing board.

Having made the walk-in space of my stash collection difficult to navigate, I then moved towards honing down the groupings. This required that I get a little more specific on the range of various colors I will need.

I am still waiting for some larger prints of the photograph to arrive. For now, I worked with some tracing paper on an 8x10 print.

This really forces me to begin to study the print. I love the variations in color. Now I am challenged to really see how value differences contribute to the scene. I start to make lists for the various areas  how many levels of a particular color I will need. Slowly, I will begin to visualize how I might capture some of the feel of the cottage and land through fabric.

My next step will be to revisit the collection lying on my ironing board/floor and begin to hone it down. Then, I will visit a few of my favorite stores to see if there are any other potential candidates there. (How my stash inevitably gets built.) As I get closer to actually choosing fabrics, I will go online for areas where I just don't like what I have been able to find in my closet and stores.

While this 'honing down' is happening, hopefully, those photo enlargements will arrive and I will work on a full scale layout for the art quilt. Typically I work from a black and white print and blow it up at Staples to a full size layout of the quilt. That will eventually be transferred to a mlar overlay that I will use in construction. You can get a general sense of that process from this blog post I wrote from last September.

Progress Report on Mylar Experiment

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an experiment in using a mylar pattern in my latest art work. I am finding it quite a useful addition to my process for my fused applique art quilts.

After creating a pattern on the mylar based on an enlarged photo, I began tracing pattern pieces from the mylar onto freezer paper and then cutting out appropriate fabrics fused with MistyFuse.

I then used the mylar as an overlay on some muslin and began laying out the pieces.

In one area of the art piece, I used a reverse applique process before setting in the fabrics. The mylar pattern was quite helpful in marking the places to cut the fabric.

 Slowly the muslin is being covered with fabric. Here you can see the piece with the mylar overlay.

Finally, there is enough fabric set in that I am only using the mylar to cut pieces and no longer need to pin it to my design board to place fabric.

I still have a lot of detail work to fuse but it is exciting to see the landscape taking shape.

Awesome Mitered Facing Tutorial

Our monthly FAFA (Rochester Area Fiber Artists) meeting was yesterday and I brought in a piece I am working on for some suggestions on binding it. In reality, I haven't been making art quilts for that many years and this was the first time that I absolutely wanted no border showing on my piece.

I received many helpful suggestions from members including Julie Brandon of Red-Dog Enterprises who had printed the base fabric for me. One person suggested that I check out the website Blue Moon River for a tutorial on a mitered facing binding. I recognized the name and checked it out. It is the website of Sue Brubaker Knapp, a well known quilter. She did have a number of free tutorials including one for facing a quilt with a mitered binding.

It was excellent!!! I was able to download a pdf with clear instructions and excellent photographs. I had already done a number of mitered bindings on quilts but never a mitered facing. I also had never bound a silk piece before. With Sue's instructions, I was able to easily create an excellent finished edge for my art work.

I have yet to baste down the back but here are some photos of a finished corner - the true test of mitered facing!

Front view

Back View, not yet sewn down

You can download Sue's instructions here. She has a number of other free tutorials on the page.

Now, on to beading the front of my quilt! When finished, it will be called Ice Flow and will be part of my growing series on Antarctica.

New Techniques/Old Projects

September has been full of travel, weddings, and family visits. Gradually time has opened up for a return to my artwork. A number of projects are in the works.....here are tidbits from two:

The oldest of UFOs
Our daughter has been visiting the past week and we have been going through old family memorabilia. This needlepoint was buried in a container with other miscellaneous photos and such.

It was a pillow top kit that an aunt had bought in Scandinavia on a trip long, long ago. She gave it to me in the 1970's to do for her and I completed it and returned with a note. It never got made into a pillow and was returned to me upon her passing back in the 1980's.

Needless to say, it is now on my 'To Do' list for September.

Mylar Experiment
I am still processing the mountain of information that I was exposed to at the June Ricky Timm's event here in Rochester.  The use of mylar in design work came up a number of times in the seminar and I have since seen it mentioned in a number of other blogs, articles, etc on art quilts.

I am currently working on another quilt in my Antarctic series and have decided to play with incorporating a mylar outline of my pattern into my process. What I have done is place a piece of mylar over a black/white photo blown up to my desired size of quilt and traced on the mylar the breakdown of the photo into fabric pieces as well as a tentative color scheme - capturing gradations for various colors I intend to use. The mylar will serve as my pattern for cutting and placing fabric. Will let you know how it goes as I work with this piece in the next month. I am excited at the possibility.

Saga of Mitered Piped Bindings

One of the demos that I really enjoyed at Ricky Tim's program in Rochester, NY a few weeks ago was of mitered, piped bindings. Ricky strongly suggests that one use #3 Pearle Cotton when you first experiment with these bindings. It took a bit of searching to find some #3 Pearle but I finally located some at the Stony Creek website. So, I spent some time last week playing with the technique with the extra motivation of two art quilts in need of binding. I hoped to submit entries for two exhibits using those quilts in the next few weeks so pressure was on to learn the technique if I wanted mitered piped bindings on those pieces.

Ricky did an excellent demo during his program and I took notes --- but that was over two weeks ago. Fortunately, he also provided a detailed workbook with plenty of photos. I needed that!

The opening stages of creating the binding was fairly simple: cut some fabric in strips, press, insert pearle cotton to create piping and attach to binding fabric. I got a chance to use my brand new #32 seven groove Bernina pintucking foot for this part.

At this point, things got a bit more complicated - even with photos.  In attaching the binding to the quilt, one starts with the mitered corners. I have done many mitered corners and thought I understood Ricky's demo fairly well. But, did I mention that this binding requires no hand sewing as you machine stitch the whole thing? That means that you are mitering a piece of fabric that is both the front and back of the corner.

This was new to me. The photos didn't really help.

 Fortunately, I had the wisdom to not try my first mitered piped binding corner on a quilt I hoped to have in an exhibition. I had a challenge piece for Jeanne Simpson's Quilt 2012 that needed to be bound. And, as I have mentioned before on this blog, Jeanne's challenge is to create 'sketches' that should be experimental in nature, approached intuitively and completed quickly. So, my corners on this week's Broken Ladders challenge were definitely experimental! The first one was totally wrong. I mitered as though I was doing a one-sided quilt border. Well, I quickly figured out that was incorrect. I kept experimenting and finally figured out enough to get the proper angle for the corner.

I then spent the remaining corners 'refining' my technique. Finally, I came up with an innovative approach that we won't discuss to 'correct' my first corner so I could send Jeanne a finished challenge piece with 4 mitered corners.

By the time I had worked through the four corners in the Broken Ladder piece, my confidence was improving. I was able to pipe and miter the first of my two unbound art quilts fairly successfully. Here is one of the corners.

Needless to say, I am extremely grateful that our Quilt Guild brought Ricky to Rochester and that I was able to attend. I expect that this will become a favored binding technique for me from now on!

In-home Study Opportunities!

I had to pass this post from Gloria Hansen's blog along - Artspark Winter Tutorial Bloghop. It is a series of 11 different tutorials that you can view. It began yesterday and continues through November 19.

I might argue with including 'Winter' in the title as it has been unseasonably warm here but it is a great opportunity to pick up some tips. 

Here is the complete list of tutorials as listed on Gloria's blog:

• November 9:: Jane LaFazio – Sketch & Stitch Gift Bags 
• November 10: Lyric Kinard – Glitter, Glisten, Glimmer: Beaded Snowflake Ornament
• November 11: Tracie Lyn Huskamp
• November 12: Melanie Testa
• November 13: Traci Bunkers – Moldable Foam Stamps
• November 14: Diana Trout  – Japanese-Style Fabric Wrap(Furoshiko)
• November 15: Judy Coates Perez – Folk Art Inspired Ornament
• November 16: Kelli Nina Perkins – Whimsical Spool Garland
• November. 17: Lisa Engelbrecht – Experimental Lettering
• November 18: Jill Berry – Geo Papers and Projects
• November 19: Gloria Hansen - Resizing an Image the Easy Way

Hope you can take advantage!

The Start of a New Series

I have decided to do a series on Paris, focusing upon my impressions from this last trip. The weather was crisp and clear which meant sunshine, blue skies, and fascinating lighting.

Here is one of the photos that I am working from. It is from an old building on Prelle place des Victoires in the second arondissement.

I edited it in Photoshop a bit and then blew up a greyscale immage to use as a guide. From there I went through my stash for an array of fabrics and began trying out ideas.








One of my first challenges was the lantern. I wanted some borders between the panels, each about 1/4 inch but not rigid. Based in part on a suggestion from Pat Pauly's workshop, I cut strips about an inch wide and hemmed to one side of a cut out panel. I then trimmed to about a half inch and hemmed with a 1/4 inch seam to another panel.

Here is the finished lantern.

Will keep you posted as the project progresses.

Busy holiday!

After all my travels, my promise to myself was to sew over the four day Thanksgiving weekend. And I did. It was wonderful. Trust that everyone who was celebrating Thanksgiving had an equally enjoyable time.

I was able to quilt and finish another quilt for our Guild's Comfort Quilt project.

Then I was able to finish the binding on a quilt that Val Schultz had done an awesome job of quilting for me.  I have another quilt back from Val that I hope to finish in the next few days.

Detail shot

I also started working on turning those two photos I wrote about earlier this month into art quilts. For both I am using Mistyfuse for part of my fusing so these are both experimental pieces for me.

I made good progress on the leaf picture. Pieced together a background and started shaping some trees with Mistyfuse.

Leaf background plus beginning of fused trees

 I also drew some leaves that I will eventually fuse to the piece in fall color fabrics. I created a 'map' of the leaves and cut out freezer paper for each leaf (and numbered them). I will play with different colors for the various leaves before I fuse them to the background.

Map of the individual leaves

And I fused the petals on the clematis art quilt.

Life will get a little hectic again for the next two weeks but I hope to have both art quilts done by the end of the year.

Quick squaring off of applique blocks

I spent this past weekend creating some more of one of my favorite blocks, Yosegi kaku to sankaku,  from "Japanese Quilt Blocks" by Susan Briscoe. It is for a challenge project and I wanted to create blocks in a variety of specific sizes. Unfortunately, often by the time I assemble this block, it is not quite square which is really critical in this project since I am intending to applique the blocks to a background.

Here is what sometimes happens - the centers are aligned but the edges leave something to be desired:

My solution was to allow an extra 1/4 in border on each side of the finished square (i.e.: make a 4 1/2 in square rather  than a 4 inch square.) . I then lined the center seams of the square up with intersection lines of the cutting mat and trimmed the four sides to have exactly two inches from the center axis on each side.

The result is a beautiful 4 inch square ready to be appliqued.

 

When I wasn't working on my Yosegi blocks, I was gathering fabrics for another project.

I also completed another "Comfort Quilt" for my local guild. One of my personal goals for my Vision Project with SAQA  is to create 10 quilts before September 2011 for charity. I am on my second Comfort Quilt and now have it ready to hand in at our October meeting. 

A Simple Block

Have you ever gotten fascinated with a single quilt block? A friend gave me a book called "Japanese Quilt Blocks" by Susan Briscoe that she picked up at a garage sale. The book depicts 123 separate quilt blocks and how to assemble them. My Turtle quilt used two of the blocks and I just completed a second quilt using the same two blocks. One of them, Yosegi kaku to sankaku, has me mesmerized. The Japanese words translate as 'squares and triangles'. The method of assembly is simple and dependable. In fact the method probably interests me as much as the design in some ways.

Here is the finished block:

 To create the block, you simply cut two sets of four rectangles - one large and one small. For this 9" block, I cut four 5" squares and four 2' squares. Set the smaller square on a corner of the larger square and sew on the diagonal. Flip the inner triangle of the small block out and trim the excess fabric along the seam line.: 

Here is how my most recent quilt top turned out.

My mind is currently racing with possiblities for changing proportions and playing with color.  I am always looking for simple patterns to assemble in tandem to working on more complex works. Yosegi kaku to sankaku fits the bill!