South African Drumbeat

When I was at Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, England this past summer, I met Magie Relph, the delightful owner of the African Fabric shop.  I bought a basket and a bit of fabric from her, and Magie admired the 12x12 quilts, and before I left I'd agreed to participate in a mini challenge with some of the other Twelves using some South African fabric called "Shweshwe."

The fabric is not what I'd have recognized as African, and when I did a bit of research, I learned why:  although it is now made in South Africa, it originated as discharged indigo fabric which was imported from England.  A South African textile company eventually started manufacturing the fabric with help from a UK investor.  And while it started as primarily indigo and brown fabrics, it's now also made in vibrant oranges, pinks, purples, and reds. 

At any rate, that quilt up top is what I did.  My inspiration was the patterns from other South African textiles, sort of like this:

 

I started by cutting a variety of shweshwe prints into strips and piecing them together.  They're so pretty, aren't they?  I tried organizing them them randomly...

and then I tried doing a light-to-dark arrangement...

and that's what I ended up using, so sewn they looked like this:

Look, even the scraps look pretty in these bright colors:

Then I layered the strip pieced under a layer of black fabric, and onto batting and a backing.  I'd drawn my design onto tracing paper, aiming for a loose and primitive use of patterns.  I arranged the patterns to create (in my own mind anyway) hills at the bottom, then grass, then flowers, then huts -- a symbolic landscape of sorts.  I layered the tissue paper on top of all of the fabric, then sewed through all of those layers with small stitches. (It made a great crinkly sound when wrestling it all under the sewing machine!)

Then, I started peeling the paper away, and cutting away parts of the black fabric to reveal the shweshwe fabric underneath.  (Yep, I know -- why did I put the paper on the black layer?  I had a reason at the time -- which I can't remember right now but trust me, there was a reason.  But after having to pull all those teeny bits of white paper off of the black fabric, I was wishing I'd sewn from the back where the teeny bits wouldn't have shown so much!)  And look -- my very sharp Havel scissors go perfectly with the color palette, don't they?

So here's the finished quilt again.  It has the sort of hand-drawn, primitive look I wanted.

Here's a detail shot.  For some reason I really like those hilly shapes and how the blades of grass look.

You can click on their names to see what Gerrie and Terry did with their shweshwe fabrics!

If you'd like to use some of these beautiful fabrics, they are available through online ordering.  In Europe, do try Magie's African Fabric shop.  In the US, Magie will ship here ... but if you want to avoid international shipping, a google search will show you where you can order them within the US.

Photoshop's Cutout Filter

Renate asked how I use Photoshop to help me define areas of color (which I mentioned when I described how I made my "Midsomer Tomato" quilt above, so I thought I'd demonstrate here. 

First, you start with a photo.  Here's one of some hydrangea florets that I took a few summers ago.

I open it in Photoshop, and go to the "filters" menu, then under the "Artistic" filter options, choose "cut out."  It selects color areas for you. One click, and voila:

When you choose the "cut out" filter,  a menu will pop up that will allow you to slide bars to select edge fidelity, color complexity, and the like.  You can slide them back and forth to see what they do, but they provide various ways of adding or subtracting detail.  If you bear in mind that you're going to try to use the color areas you see as pieces of fabric, you'll remember that keeping it simple while including just the detail you need is the goal.  Here's a simpler version of the same image:

Remember, you can add back detail with thread wok.  So maybe all you want is a fabric base on which to thread paint more color and detail?  Or maybe you want the fabric to do the work, so you'll want more detail?  It's up to you. 

Once I get to this point, I print out the image at what I want the finished size to be.  (I often have to do this by taping 8 x 11 sheets together because that's all my printer will do.)  Then, with a black relatively heavy-line black sharpy, I trace the color areas.

Here's a shot of the tomato one:

You can see that I take each color (in the tomato case, I had reds, blues, and greens) and I assign Dark, Light and Medium value labels. 

Then I trace the whole thing onto tracing paper, and then I trace pattern shapes and assemble from there using the marked image as my guide.  It's sort of tedious but it's really fun to see the picture taking shape.  I don't follow this slavishly -- it's meant to be a fabric painting, after all, not a paint-by-number project. So use your artistic judgment and have fun.

I should add that I never use Photoshop Elements so I don't know if Elements as a "cutout" filter.  Sometimes there is a filter called Posterize that can do similar things. 

Azalea Encore

So here is where I am with this piece.  I'm still listening for the quilt to tell me whether it is done or not.  Apparently it's speaking too quietly or I'm not paying attention closely enough -- so for now, this is where it sits.

If you click on the photo, you can see that I added a lot of machine quilting.  My friend Loretta commented on how painterly this looks, which was gratifying as I'd been thinking of that fabric texture as impressionistic paint strokes.  I'd sketched and doodled and tried to figure out how to add stitch to emphasize that.  My conclusion was that it'd be best to suggest flowers and leaves and let the fabric texture create the brushstrokes.

But once I got the quilting on, it just sat there on all of that texture and seemed to compete in a confused sort of way.  So I pulled out my new Inktense pencils and started highlighting petals and leaves with more color.  I tried to add color while flowing with the direction of the fabric texture, again to use the fabric but also define the shapes more.

I think I'm venturing into the "Stop torturing this poor fabric" territory so I will put this away for a bit.  I tend to like it more when I first see it walking into the room -- and maybe that sense of jumbled color and the suggestion of flowers and foliage is the best this can do.  I'm not sure.

I still feel like it NEEDS something.  But it won't tell me what just yet.

In the Works

Oh, I have so many things in the works and I am pulled in all sorts of directions.  How I am longing for a week -- even one entire day! -- with nothing to do but play with fabric.  Perhaps I can squeeze it into the schedule this weekend.  Meanwhile, here's one of the projects I am excited about.

I made this fabric by drawing the lines with a tjanting tool and acrylic paint, then added color with diluted acrylic paint.  I tell you, just the drawing process is meditative and mesmerizing.

Then these fellows were added with a stencil...

So I am eager to keep going but real work and family matters distract me.  Darn.  You'll have to tune back in to see where this goes.

Feeling Headless

So I'm in this funny phase.  It's one I go through from time to time.  You'd think I'd figure it out eventually.  But it's about this:  What am I doing with this quilting stuff?  I feel like I am all over the place, doing a bit of everything, without ever focusing on any one technique or style or direction.

Do I have a style?  I can't see that I do, in any definite way.  I so admire some of my friends whose pieces have a strong voice and style and a distinctive cohesion. They do what they do, and they do it beautifully, and they push themselves into new places, but their work looks like it belongs to them.  And it looks like they have a path that they know they are on, and they are moving purposefully on that path.

I don't seem to have a path.  I feel more like Gemma at the dog park, rushing in all directions at once and running in circles until her tongue is hanging out.  And I feel like my work looks like a collection of random stuff.  And I'm often dissatisfied at how stiff it seems to me.  I have this idea of what I WANT my work to be -- looser, freer, more spontaneous and joyful ... but how to get there eludes me.

So, you're thinking: "JUST DO IT."  Yeah, I think that's right.  I need to just let myself play.

One of my favorite artists wrote in a book that she posted a list of seven words on the wall in her studio, to remind her of what she wants her work to be.  She has her list of adjectives, like "serene."  "Clear."  That sort of thing.  And with each piece, she runs down her list to see if she has met each of her seven words, and if not, why not.

It's a great idea, isn't it?  But me, I can't even decide on the seven words.

I think this is the mood that drives me to piecing.  Just letting fabric slide through my fingers, pulled along by the feed dogs, allows me to meditate on all of this.  Piecing, at least what I'm doing these days, requires very little brain power or decision making.  It feels good to assemble pieces of fabric and create blocks of color and pattern.  It makes me feel like I'm DOING something and, in fact, I'm getting things made and finished and that feels good.

So I need to choose a path.  For now, not forever. And maybe think about some adjectives to help me stay on that path.  And I need to give myself time to play.

If you had to pick 5-7 adjectives that describe the work you do, what would your list be?

Help! I've cut strips and I can't get up!

Okay, this is driving me crazy.

About a year ago, I cut fabric for a particular project.  And while I was cutting, I cut strips for a second project out of those same fabrics.  I now have a lovely box of 2 1/2" and 4" strips.  For a particular purpose ... WHICH I CANNOT REMEMBER.

I have been through my binders of patterns, looking for anything that would have caused me to choose those strip cuts.  I have looked through my Kaffe Fassett books, knowing I always love making those quilts and maybe my strip cutting was aimed at one of those.  I've hunted around the internet, looking for strip quilts that might have appealed to me at some point.

I can't find anything that jogs the least tiny corner of a memory.  And the really annoying thing is that as soon as I give up the search and decide to do something else with them, I'll come across the original thing and know that THAT was what I wanted to do and I'll wish I'd waited.

Sigh.

So I'm appealing to you, quilting friends..  Do you happen to know of some quilt that requires 2 1/2 inch and 4 inch strips?  What the HECK was I thinking?

Distracted

 I've not blogged in a bit because I've been off wandering -- mentally -- in the Land of Too Many Distractions.  Family life, home-schooling (all GOOD distractions, of course) ... I've not just been able to focus.  I've picked up books and magazines with beautiful fiber art, and I've thought "how wonderful" and them put them down and have not felt the urge to move into the sewing room.

I've been picking up my camera, instead, and taking pictures on my daily wanderings. That has felt manageable time-wise, and has satisfied my creativity.  I seem to be in the throes of another severely insomniac phase, so playing with Photoshop is a good, peaceful activity for the middle of the night.  The photo above is from a recent vineyard walk. We're approaching harvest time here, so the vines are laden with grapes and look so lovely right now.

I've had some fabric moments, lest you think I've totally abandoned all things fabric.  I've been making progress on my City and Guilds activities, so I thought I'd share a recent project.  The assignment was to select a photo of an architectural element, then to design a paper-pieced block and sew it.  As usual, I made it harder on myself by hunting for photos and taking pictures and drawing block designs repeatedly, striving to find one that I fell in love with.  I wanted to create a block that made me itch to sew it, that made me gasp with delight.

 It didn't happen.  And somewhere, after slaving over graph paper and designing things on Electric Quilt 6 (that sure does make seeing the results of designs easy), I realized that I just needed to do the dang assignment and move on.  If I didn't love it, fine.  The point, of course, was to show I knew how to design and sew a paper-pieced block.  Which I'd done umpteen times over, on my quest to find The Perfect Design.

So, here's where I ended up.  I started with this photo, liking the detail in that four-square motif there in the center: 

That led to this block, which I liked for its birdish design:

And here's how it look with four together:

Phew.  Assignment done.  But I sure did make it harder than it needed to be.

Labikeet Colors

We are revealing our newest round of 12x12 inch quilts over on Twelve by 12 today!  This time, our color theme was "Lorikeet colors."  Brenda, who lives in Australia, sees these bright birds in her yard all of the time (I've only seen them at the zoo!) and was inspired by their lively colors to choose this palette and see what we'd all do with it.  I love that this challenge involves all of us sharing some of the color in her daily life.    If you've not seen a lorikeet, here's what one looks like.  Imagine, having these fly about your backyard!

I love bright fabrics, and I have lots of brights in my fabric stash.  So my difficulty in approaching the challenge wasn't the color palette, but how to use them.  I have such a literal brain that I kept getting stuck on lorikeets!  I sure looked at a lot of pictures of them!

Coincidentally, I had just gotten Susan Carlson's new book Serendipity Quilts.  In this new book, she's refined the free cutting fabric collage technique from her earlier book (remember all those great fish?) and I was eager to work a bit with that technique.

At some point as I was looking at lorikeets and their colors for inspiration, I started thinking about how funny it would look if other ordinary animals had these flashy markings.  That thought amused me and it was an easy jump to imagine my lab/weimaraner mix Gemma as a "labikeet"!

To accomplish that, I started with a photo of Gemma that I thought had enough profile to allow me to show the colorful markings.  Using that as my guide, I made a muslin base which I marked up with sharpie markers to show where I wanted the colors to go.

Using that as the base, I placed fabric pieces almost mosaic-style to create her markings and (trying to) create the shadows and highlights.  Carlson's technique involves gluing the pieces down loosely using a glue stick or other flexible glue, and then trapping everything under a layer of tulle before stitching.  To be honest, I found that sort of fiddly, as the little bits wanted to move around.  I guess I was too light-handed with the glue!  I'd be inclined to work with fusible next time -- although fusing the WonderUnder to the fabric is a step that takes some time, and this process allows you to jump right in with even tiny scraps that you happen to have lying around, the ease of working with un-adhered bits vs ones you can fuse in place makes the advance work worth it in the end, I think.

I made a heck of a mess while I was doing this -- fabric everywhere!  The quilting was great fun at the end, and then I finished this with a simple facing.

Gemma is now "Labikeet!"

Be sure to hop over to the Twelve by 12 blog to see what the other 11 in the group did!  You won't be disappointed!

Stripping

I've been having fun sewing these strip sets together for a new project.  I've had a pattern for a quilt called Charmed Circles (designed by A Graceful Stitch) for some time, and I decided to get to work on it.  You know, new sewing machine, new quilt!

There are times when simple piecing feels so meditative and relaxing.  I've enjoyed the "stripping."  But there is something sort of funny about sewing all the pieces together, and then having to cut them apart again into pumpkin seed shapes.

I wanted meditative and not complex -- so here I am, using a plastic template, tracing in pencil, and cutting with scissors.  I'll be so relaxed I'll be catatonic.

Charming

I've mentioned here before that I've been playing with small quilts that incorporate old photographs.  In part, that is due to family matters presenting me with scads of old photos... and in part, it's because just when the pictures presented themselves to me I was charged with the task of identifying a series I wanted to explore this year in my Practical Design Workshop.  In January, when it came time to designate what my series would be, I didn't want to take on any big series idea.  And the idea of making a small quilt each month as a) my series work and b) an ongoing exploration of how to transfer photos to fabric and use them in a whimsical, non-sentimental way in quilts fit my mood.

My July project involved a photo I fell in love with. 

As I was sorting through a box of photos from my recently deceased mother-in-law, I came across this near the top.  It's my husband's brother Ron when he was about 10 years old.  Their next door neighbor was a professional photographer who did photos for catalogs and magazines, and apparently he enlisted Roger's family members as models from time to time.  This one?  Who knows what the point was -- selling the air-filled plastic snake?

In any event, it needed to be a quilt.  So, here's my piece for this month, titled "Charmer":

It's about 14" x 16".  I had a great time making it.  I printed the photo onto fabric with my inkjet printer, and added color with colored pencils.  I was happy to find the green snakeskin-like fabric in my stash.  I used Markal painstiks to stencil the word "Charmer" onto the background fabric, and then I added square spirals from a stamped I carved.

Here's a detail shot:

I inset a flange of the green fabric -- it needed the inner border to my eye and I liked the raised texture of the flap.  The dense stipple quilting gives a snaky texture to the background, too.

All in all, a fun project.  It's heading off to Ron for his birthday -- I wouldn't be surprised if he has totally forgotten he ever posed for this picture.

Simply A Mess

So I'm working on this challenge project -- can't show it here until the challenge is revealed on my retreat next week -- and I decided I wanted to add some words.  I thought about all of the different ways I could get them onto fabric, and then remembered a fabric spray paint I'd found while roaming the aisles at a craft store some time ago.  It says it's made to be used on fabric, preferably cotton, and that it works like airbrushing.

"Simply Spray," it's called.  I thought might be useful at some point, and yesterday I decided to give it a whirl.

I printed out the words on the computer, then made a stencil by cutting the letter shapes out of freezer paper.  I ironed the stencil firmly to the background fabric I was using.  And, following the directions of the spray, I tested a tiny bit first and it seemed like it would work fine.  I sprayed, waited for it to dry, and peeled away the stencil.  And here's what I got:

Aarrgh!  A total mess!  Look at how it bled!  It totally ruined the background fabric and made the lettering look like huge black blobs.  As far as I'm concerned, makes this product unusable UNLESS you want to just fill in a big area of color and don't need to worry about edges.  AARRGH!

Luckily, I'd bought the background fabric (which was perfect for my purposes) at the shop in town, so I hopped into the car and bought another piece.  And, while I was driving and seething, I realized I could just apply wonder-under to the mess and cut out the letters.

So, that's what I did, which led to this:

When I was cutting the stencil out of freezer paper, it had crossed my mind that I could just be cutting the individual letters out of wonder-undered black fabric, instead of using stencils and paint.  But the stencil and paint idea seemed so much better! And then I had to cut them individually anyway.

The good news is that I was able to rescue the project and get it to be where I wanted it with only a few hours' extra work.

But I chucked that "Simply Spray" into the trash and won't be buying THAT again.

Consider yourself warned!

Code in my node

I'm in the middle of the worst head cold I've had in years, and my head feels like I've taken every scrap of batting in the house and crammed it into my skull.  A lovely feeling, let me tell you.  So I've been doing a lot of napping and reading and dozing and watching mindless tv.  One of these days I might be able to hear again and breathe through both nostrils at the same time!  I can hardly wait!  In the meantime, I've got my kleenex and a glass of grapefruit juice at my side at all times and I'm getting by.

In the meantime, I've been using this forced down-time to make some  progress on another City and Guilds activity on English paper piecing...  which is another thing I never thought I'd do. It just seemed  pointless, frankly. The exercise involved choosing a photo (above), then translating it into blocks of color, like so:

 

A great abstraction technique, yes?   Coloring triangles was a perfect afternoon activity for stuffy-headed me.  And then the trick was sewing the pieces:

This is as far as I've gotten, because in my usual "Can I possibly make this harder on myself?" style, I made the triangles quite small and it makes for dang fussy sewing. Still, it was rather enjoyable and good tv sewing.  I can actually see myself using this technique on something someday.  With bigger pieces, that is.

Time for my mid-afternoon nap now.

Show and Tell

I was reading something recently about blogging, and referring to blogging as a modern day show-and-tell for grown-ups.  I think that's just about right.  No wonder I like blogging and reading blogs -- I always loved show and tell as a kid.

So here's my show and tell for the day:  I've been playing with Shiva painstiks this afternoon.  Actually, some time ago I bought a bargain bunch of the british Markal paintstiks on Ebay for a bargainous price, so I was using those.  They're strange items, those paintstiks---especially that tough outer skin.  But I'm getting the hang of using them, and today's assignment was to use a design inspired by a leaf shape, make a freezer paper stencil, and apply in some repetitive design on fabric. 

Here is my inspiration photo, of some tiny weed I photographed this weekend -- something about those whimsical leaf shapes appeals to me:

I made mirror image stencils:

And this was the result:

I'm not sure what I'll do with this from here ... Maybe I'll figure that out on another play day!

Strip pieced line study

Yesterday I spent some time working on a line study assignment for a course.  The assignment was to choose a photograph that featured line as a strong element.  Here's my photo:

Then, we were to use strip piecing to construct a design from the image; I did this:



And from there, I used reverse applique and machine quilting to get to this:

It was a fun assignment, and satisfying to get it done.  It's funny -- I never thought I would find a realistic style of art an easy one, but it is the place I tend to go first -- it is stretching the realistic image into something abstract that is the challenge for me.  Maybe I should try to take this and stretch it to something more abstract for my next mini-project...

Face It!

Yesterday, I finally found a bit of time to begin the steps of finishing the fuchsia quilt.  (Yeah, sorry, you're probably getting tired of seeing this...) First, squaring up -- there is something about the quilt blocks on two sides that creates an optical illusion of being out-of-square, and that stumped me for a while.  I kept measuring and marking.  I pulled out the Ricky Tims DVD on finishing techniques ("Grand Finale")  to remind myself about what HE does to square up quilts -- his finishing techniques are impeccable and I highly recommend the DVD.  More measuring, more marking, and finally I trimmed.  Sheesh. The quilt is actually square in this shot, although I think the photographic angle (necessitated by my shoving myself up against the closet door behind the sewing table to get an almost-straight-on shot of my teeny design wall behind the door) makes it look wonky. Oh, and after I took the shot, I trimmed a few inches off of the top edge, so the leaves feel more like they're at the top and not hanging there in the middle. Nothing like making precisely pieced blocks to hack them all off...

Then, I turned to my friend Brenda, who just happens to be an expert on finishing techniques!  I have a copy of her DVD on finishing techniques, so I popped that in to the computer to see her tips for making the best facing.  Excellent!  Brenda provides a free tutorial on her facing technique here, in case you need help as I did.

And that consumed my fabric-play time yesterday.  Sigh.  I am looking forward to sitting down with a movie and hand-sewing the facing, now.

A little paint, a little stitching...

I've made some good progress on the fuchsias.  You might remember I was bugged by a dramatic line in the lower right corner, between the quilt block part and the solid background.  Yesterday, I got out my acrylic paints and painted in some shapes.  I'm much happier with it now, even though I did manage to get a green blob of paint on the shoulder of my shirt when I put the paintbrush in my mouth briefly (so as NOT to get the paint on the quilt, of course), then turned my head and, as a result, jammed the paint end of the brush into my shoulder.  Sigh.  I am not a tidy artist.

Last evening, my Juki and I applied quilting, leaving the lattice strips unquilted.  I'm liking the result and will decide whether the quilting is done after I've had a chance to look at it more carefully.

I can't even say how delighted I am to have moved this piece to this stage.  I have had it on my mind for so long-- years, in fact -- wondering where to go from the bare fuschia blossoms I'd gotten done to that point.  So it feels like all that mulling and waiting was worthwhile, because I never would have gone in this direction if I'd pushed myself to finish it back then. 

After a long, long incubation period...

Some years ago (3, maybe?  4?), I took a 3-day class from Jane Sassaman, and the fuchsias above are what resulted.  I liked it a lot as far as it went, but I didn't know where to go with it from there.  At the time, I think, I planned to crop it way down, so that those upper leaves would be cut off and maybe even part of the fuchsia on the right.  So, I stalled.  I liked it enough that I didn't want to finish it just to finish it, and it seemed like a good idea to let the ideas percolate.

Over those years, I'd take it out of the closet and hang it on my design wall and contemplate it, with the goal of finally getting it done.  At one of those times, I remembered that I'd chosen fuchsias to begin with because they remind me of my grandmother.  She had hanging baskets of them on her patio, and as a kid I was fascinated by their little balloon-like buds and how they look like tiny graceful dancers.  And somewhere along the way, I thought about incorporating some sense of lattice to the background, because I remember looking up at the fuchsias against the lattice patio cover.

Well, after all that time, something hit me a few weeks ago and I've been working away on this.  Finally!  How satisfying to get this piece back out and to make progress on it!  I was looking at quilt blocks, and found an old traditional block called "Grandmother's Choice."  How appropriate, eh?  I tried to piece them in a way that creates a lattice pattern, and I've attached the fuchsias and leaves to that frame.



















I'm still not satisfied with the lower right corner -- where the dark teal background creates a sharp vertical line against the blocks... I've tried drawing in a bit of the block to fill in, but it doesn't overcome the heavy line.  I may end up fusing/appliqueing some parts of blocks to have them sort of fade into the background.  We'll see.
But I'm liking where this is going so far. (BTW, it's hanging kind of wonkily on my wall but it is actually straight.  Or it will be.)