Quilting and other Things

January: I picked up a copy of the McCall’s Special Issue Quilting with the Pros. The workshop by Libby Lehman inspired the thread painting in the old English H of this journal. I also started reading the book The Illuminator by Brenda Rickman Vantrease which inspired simple embellishment of the H. I think another time, I leave out the scrolls and work more with the leaves, butterflies and maybe some flowers. A little more sketching of the design before hand would have been useful. February: We haven’t had much snow this year however one Saturday we did get some. It started to melt then got very cold. All the trees and bushes shimmered with ice. This journal is an attempt to capture some of the feeling of that day. There is Angelina fibres, thread painting, tule and crystals. March: I’ve been taking a class through QuiltUniversity.com with Marilyn Belford called Realistic Fabric Portraits. This months journal has a lot of the rejected pieces from the portrait I’m working on...

Last year, and this year, I participated in the Journal Quilts project. Last week my 2005 Journals came home. The photos of those aren't posted yet so while I'm waiting to be able to post the 2006 Journals I thought I'd post the 2005 journals. January: The first one was a "whole cloth" journal. The sketch was doodled over a series of daily meetings until I found what I liked. Then I started to quilt. I didn’t actually transfer the drawing to the fabric. Just kept the paper near the machine and used it as a reference. Variegated purple rayon thread was used to stitch the outline of the vase and the flowers – I accidentally started to quilt a leaf but then the thread broke. Probably the first time I’ve been happy the thread broke as I hadn’t really meant to quilt the leaves. Next was the brown silk thread to do the scribbles at the bottom to represent the table top. Then white silk thread to do all the tiny, tiny stippling around the vase – The fingers hardly move...

I finished the Who will bell the cat? quilt last night. The last parts were adding the bell and quilting cats in the windows. The cat outlines are from Callee perched on the corner of her scratchy post. I printed a line drawing from this picture then traced part onto tracing paper to act as a stitching guide. I still need to add the hanging sleeve and label but the photos and other information for the challenge were submitted last evening. The deadline is Oct 1 so I'm pleased to be a tiny bit early. This is the detail photo Eventually all the submitted quilts will be shown on the challenge pages at QuiltArt The version of the story I worked on is at Project Gutenberg

The mice are finally all stitched. The back window needs to be moved over / made smaller to make room for a photo of the dangerous cat. I'm still not positive how the windows are getting attached. Think I'll go find some dinner and stare at it some more this evening. Below is a detail photo of one of the mice. There is a little bit of pink in every ear. I have a bell on a piece of ribbon. I'm trying to decide if it actually fits in or not. This needs to be finished and photos submitted for Oct 1. I was thinking I wouldn't make it, but today I think I just might. We'll see how things go.

There have been some posts recently about how to check colour and value. One suggestion was a bit of a "Why didn't I think of that?" moment. -- When checking colours and values, don't just take a photo of the WIP, take the photo in B&W to check the value as well. If your camera doesn't have a B&W setting, then use the computer to switch the image to B&W. I took some pictures of some completed and one in-progress quilt. It's been interesting looking at the comparison of colour and B&W photos. The first pair is a small wallhanging called Hooray for Bleach! The guild challenge was the red paisley, the dark purple and the red. The theme was Night & Day. I was about to put the fabrics into the stash and give up. Then I remembered a bleaching lesson. Took small pieces of each one to see what would happen. They bleached very nicely. The next pair is a mystery quilt from an all-night class. We were to bring a stack of pre-trimmed FQ. I pulled them...

I spent part of this afternoon starting to stitch Belling the Cat. This is going to take a while. There are 34 mice and its taking about 20 or 30 minutes to stitch and steam a mouse. I've done six. Here's what one of them looks like with the stitching: There's some pink at the edge of the ear to add to all the mice as well as eyes (on most of them). Callee did require a cuddle part way through one mouse. However, most of the time she spent curled up on the pack-sack. Also spent some time stitching the hearts on the $10 quilt and making a postcard:

A couple of years ago, Mom, Karen & I took a fabric dyeing class out at Hobby Horse. It was fun so we bought some additional supplies. Last Sunday afternoon I finally used mine. I had planned to do it the week before but discovered I didn't have enough PFD cloth. I thought I had lots of fabric. Then I re-read my notes and discovered I was 10 metres short! The notes said 25g of dye needed 1 litre of chemical water. 1 litre of dye does about 4 metres of fabric. I had 4 colours therefore 16 metres of fabrics. I should have also added up all the 1/4 cups and 1tbsp measures to see how much dye I had listed in the "recipes". I think I was actually short more material than initially thought. My colours were all Procion MX dyes -- 504 Sky Blue, 208 Bright Yellow, 405 Hot Pink and 708 Black. I did a graduated run of 8 of each of the colours then a rainbow run but mixed black into the colours as well (still sticking with just two colours in a bag). At the end, I mixed equal par...

This is Miss Callee. She's decided that curling up with her toys is a good spot to sleep in the evenings. She works hard to keep me in line and train me as well as she has my sister trained.