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.