Sorry for the lapse in blogging but this has been a busy couple months. The season for teaching classes is wrapping up as the holidays approach so I'm looking forward to catching up on all the things that I've neglected or just wanted to do. There's so much I want to do. I moved my old Welsh and English quilts to a better storage set-up where I can actually get to them which will make it easier to get out a particular one if I want to get pictures. I love the old British quilts but they are just a part of what interests me with quiltmaking and related textiles.
So, to catch up on what I've been up to, I taught a class for a guild in Cosmopolis, Wa last weekend and had a really good time with some very free spirited quilters. It's the second time this year I've worked with them and they're a blast. This class featured curved piecing and they took to it fearlessly. We also worked with finishing smaller quilts with a mock binding which I plan to do a tutorial on in the very near future.
I'm also involved with an art quilting group that meets once a month, it's a low-pressure group that includes about everything to do with fiber and fabric. We often have more ideas than actual tangible works but we share a lot of encouragement and inspiration. We've done some small challenges from time to time but this last summer, we decided to do some discharging of fabric, swap it around with each other and then do something with our discharged fabrics. The pictures that follow are of the process I've undertaken with the fat quarter that I acquired. It's a little stark or just plain bright at it's current stage but one of the things that we're focusing on is showing work in progress to show off the stages of the finished pieces. That means that we show the work in progress at stages when it doesn't alway make sense yet or reveal the vision of what the maker 'sees' in the work in progress.
This is the piece I got for the challenge from Andrea, she poured the bleach agent onto the burgundy sateen fabric, folded it and this is what she got and now it's mine to do with. A lot of ideas for stitching it out went through my head but I finally settled on cutting out circles, to applique them onto sateen and then add a lot of stitching.
So, I used my circle template to see if I thought the circles would work, cut them out and stitched them onto gold sateen squares.
When I have a piece at this point, I would rather keep it to myself to avoid 'funny' remarks from folks but since I'm trying to share the steps, I decided to include it in todays's post. When I showed it to the art quiilt group, one of the women told me she really appreciated getting to see it at this point because she so frequently gave up on a project when it hit an awkward spot in process. I do have a vision for the stitching of the piece after the blocks are assembled but I don't think I can put it into words.
I tried to arrange the blocks to take advantage of the way sateen reflects light but I won't know until it's finished if that was successful. Also, in the picture, you can see a bit of applique on the left of the gold blocks. These blocks are from an applique series I'm leading at Rubystreet which is called FA LA LA LA LA, it's a Belgian inspired Christmas wall quilt which you may have seen featured in QUILTMANIA magazine about a year ago. A lot of work. Interesting pattern.
This picture shows some student blocks with the two reindeer and the lettering.
This is April Works, showing us her piece at a recent art quilt meeting. April's MASTER PLAN was created in class with Jean Wells and is featured in Jean Wells latest book, Journey to Inspired Art Quilting. April's piece was juried into the LaConner Museum's recent quilt exhibit and was awarded a second place. Way to go April!
Time to get back to work. The rain has returned to this part of the world after a very dry late summer and even the frogs have rusted. More later.
