Embellish with Hand Stitching

The final stage of creating Sue's "Falling Leaves" piece was to embellish with hand stitching.  The green background was really begging for some texture, so the first step was filling that in with some "ricing" or "chicken scratch" stitches.

That helped a lot, but also made some of leaves with less paint stand out more - and not in a good way!  So obviously they needed some stitching too.

Here's a close-up of the filled in leaves.

The next addition was using a backstitch to add veins to the applique leaves.

Finally, after adding the binding, which is fused in place, a blanket stitch was added over the edge of the binding. 

The variegated floss adds dimension as well as texture and helps bring the piece to life.

Polymer Clay - Mokume Gane

Last Saturday, Elizabeth and her son, Thomas, took a polymer clay class at Artistic Artifacts taught by Susan Gantz.  The class was about Mukume Gane, a method of manipulation where you stack varying values of clay, impress it with many different textured items, then shave the layers and collect the shaving to create a project.  Elizabeth started with maroon, a metallic beige and white clays to create a three color stack which reminded her of red onions.

She created some buttons and also some flat pieces that she could make into pins.

After a lunch break class moved on to four layer stacks with two darks and two lights layered many times.  Elizabeth's stack:

Thomas's stack after shaving and stretching:

After shaving them down class members made buttons, pendants, pins, and pieces for mosaic work. The last hour we learned some other fun techniques like rolling our layers into lizard tails and creating canes that look like brains. 

 Lizard tails, above.

 Brain cane, above, and buttons, below.

This class was a great opportunity to work in a medium other than fiber yet still use the basic principles of color and come out with a few cool items that could either be turned into jewelry or added to a surface design project, journal or other mixed media work.

Passion Play - Little Birdie

The little birdie was the last addition to this quilt, and it too, is screen printed.  (It is also available in our Etsy shop.) I printed it in a few different colors but of course the black looked best.  It is printed on a color catcher and made into a fusible applique.  Not familiar with color catchers?  They are a laundry product made by Shout that you add to the washing machine to absorb excess dye.  They are intended for use with clothing that you think might bleed color, but are also great for use when washing fabric that's been dyed.  I throw one in the washer every time I wash fabric that I've dyed, and I've got a stack of a variety of colors.  They are great for printing on, and also for fusible applique since the edges won't fray - kind of like interfacing but not too stiff.

After fusing wonder under to the back of the bird, I cut it out pretty close to the outline and then fused it onto the quilt.  It is also edge stitched around the outside of the bird.  And since he looked like he needed something in his beak, I added the beads and disk that I found in an embellishment pack in my stash.  Here's a close up.

And there you have it - the anatomy of a quilt!

Passion Play - Piece 7

The last piece in this quilt is the orange-ish horizontal piece that kind of ties it all together. 

Once again, this is a piece that has several processes on it.  It was a pale orange-pink color after dyeing with some mostly spent dye that mostly washed out.  So I used it for a breakdown screen printing experiment (another type of printing process), and that too mostly washed out!  So last summer during quilt camp, when we made the crackle screens (there are actually 2 versions), I printed on this piece with thickened dye through the crackle screen.  Thankfully, this time the dye was fresh enough that it didn't wash out and you see the result above.  I cut a strip of this to place across the quilt and added some dyed cotton lace and a piece of yarn at the top for a perch for the little bird.

I had to remove the binding from the lace to flatten it out, and after it was machine stitched to the quilt, I embellished it further with hand stitching, using the holes in the lace as a guide.  Click on the photo for a closer look.

Passion Play - Piece 5

Well, here it is, piece 5, the one commercial fabric used in this composition - this beautiful batik!

I hand stitched with perle cotton (#5) with the various threads in the photo below.

If you click on the full image below, you should be able to see the stitching more closely.  It was simply a matter of stitching the lines printed in the batik - easy-peasy.

Holiday Ornaments

Last week I was in need of some hand crafted holiday ornaments to donate to the Virginia Quilt Museum.  Of course they needed to have some screen printing, so I selected a few holiday images that I thought would work, and decided to print on some linen fabric for a natural look.   I cut 5 1/2 inch squares of the linen.  The screens I used were a vintage tree design made up of rows of birds, and a vintage pine branch that I combined with a bird.  I also remembered I had some wooden printing blocks that were trees, so I used those too. These are the initial prints.  You might be able to see that I drew a diagonal chalk line to help me center the image.  The top 2 are the screen printed designs, the bottom 2 are the block prints.

I had bought some embellishment products at Artistic Artifacts when I got this idea, so next I pulled those out to see what I could do to liven them up a bit.  One is a metallic thread, and the other is an embellished ric-rac trim, both made by Tentakulum from Germany.

On the block printed trees, I did french knots on the branches - they look almost like beads.  I used the ric-rac on the screen printed tree, and on the pine and bird design I made 2 french knots in the bird's beak to look like seeds.

The final step was stitching them together & stuffing, with a ribbon in the top corner for hanging.  I put the 2 block printed trees together, one on each side, and the screen printed designs together, one on each side.  Of course, you could easily put another holiday fabric on the back to make more ornaments.  Hmm...that's a good idea if I make more!