Printing

I spent a wonderful day printing fabric down at Betchworth. I am doing a whole Wet and Wild course down there starting in February so I wanted to see what the set up was.  And so I played with the thermafaxes that I had:

This piece started off as a hand dyed pinky-beige colour which certainly did not owe me anything so I was quite pleased with the result of this overall pattern.

This was the base print on some cotton sateen and I then followed it with layers of black and a wonderful named ink "Metallic Chocolate" - says it all really doesn't it.

Then I played using a large wood block which I bought in the summer. I did this on some commercial fabric.

This is on a commercial cream/yellow tone on tone

This was a truly awful olive fabric which I print twice - it looks a lot better than it did. I should have taken a photo of it before I started but you will just have to take my word for it - it was certainly one of those fabric that I seriously wonder why I bought in the first place!!

The setting of the barn is spectacular and we even had snow in the morning. This is the view out of the window

I am now in clean up mode for Christmas. I really need my kitchen back so the cutting board is having to be hidden for the duration of the holidays.

I have three quilts all sandwiched and ready to be quilted over the holidays so hopefully will have at least two finishes by the end of the year.

Hoping you all have a very peaceful and happy Christmas and holidays.

See you in the New Year.

Cool Britannia

I promised ages ago that I would show you a photograph of the challenge which had been set by my group for their Christmas present exchange. As I said before the theme for the present should be Cool Britannia.

Well I did it:

and here is a close up

Now I suspect you are asking what my thought process was to end up with this small offering. Well - Cool Britannia to me means that era at the end of the 1990s here in Britain when Tony Blair was Prime Minister and he was cosying up to lots of pop stars and artists. There was a special group of artists known as the YBA (young Bristish artists) who  were making artistic waves at the time. None more so thatn Damian Hirst with his shark installations and other wonderful weird creations. Well I did not think anyone would want a depiction of those but I love his spot pictures and so I thought I would produce my own homage to his work.  The quilting is done in a kantha style.

I have just spent the most marvellous morning printing fabric - I have never done this before and I really loved it. I used some fabric that really did not owe me anything so I did not mind if I made a complete hash of it all but I really loved it.

I have three thermofaxes which I have picked up at various shows and was just too scared to use. So here are the results so far

The thermofax was the lighter design and then I used a credit card to  put some outline on.  I am thinking it looks rather like a city scape and am wondering what it would look like in shades of brown and grey - watch this space!

Then I used a fax with a flower motif

This definitely needs more work - other colours etc. but I quite like the fax itself.

But my favourite is:

My teacher (hi Maggie!) was very encouraging and made me be much freer than I would normally be - I kind of like things in rows and planned which is was the blue flowers were but then I dabbed on some of the green flowers, followed by the yellow and then the blue/black and finally the sheer white.

Now the challenge is to cut it into three inch squares and see what one could do with it.

I am off to Committed to Cloth tomorrow for the day so I will do some more printing and see what happens.

Is this going to make me give up buying commercial fabric - I am not sure but I think it certainly has possibilities.

Happy quilting.

A quick finish

I spent the weekend machine quilting this quilt

The first thing I have to confess to is that I did not do any of the applique - I bought this piece about five years ago in an interior decorating shop. I also have another one which I will probably do this weekend as well.

But I wanted to use it as a top in order to help practice my machine quilting - I did it in spurts of about 20-30 minutes over three days.

I used a wonky heart and  loop pattern which I just made up. I know that Patsy Thompson has a pattern very similar to this but she goes into the heart at the top and I started from the pointy end. I could not get to grips with her way of doing it. Funny how everyone is different.  Am I pleased with this - well the hearts are certainly wonky and on a few occasions unrecognisable but I think I am being very picky and no-one will notice the flaws.  On the plus side the quilting is fairly even and luckily the varigated Oliver Twist thread I used was very close to the check so you can't see it too much. I used a Wondeful Invisifil thread on the back which was really good - very fine and in an ecru colour did not detract from the fabric on the back.

Gosh I have to finish as I keep on seeing all the mistakes in the close up of the quilting. I need to post this or I shall delete it in horror!!!

Happy Quilting