Yesterday's results

Here's the results of yesterday's dyeing session, all ironed up. I would have done more but I ran out of fabric. 

..and this...

..though it was too cold for the turquoise, and it's faded to a light blue.
..and this. I think that's another turquoise piece on the lower left side. The ones I don't love quite as much will be split into fat quarters - these are all 1 metre lengths. 

Doing the ironing....

I love this one.... 

No, seriously....

..this is WORK!!!! But better than selling insurance, no????? 

What a girl wants, what a girl needs....

It's a beautiful morning, so what else would a girl do? If you're Dye Girl, that is?

Now...what goes with yellow and orange? Raspberry of course...plus a bit of teal....and why not some of THAT..... some of the best pieces I make are "WHF, let's just throw on whatever's left" pieces. 

It's not about the stitching

There's an interesting thread (pardon the pun) at Melody Johnson's blog. Melody has always quilted her work extensively, but is now producing simpler pieces and has become unhappy with heavy quilting on them, so she's wrestling with doing less. Her readers are divided on this, some supporting the "more" side, and some (like me) the "less" view.

I accepted several years ago that I didn't quilt like others, and I got over it. In New Zealand, free motion quilting used to be synonomous with stippling , which I could not master and I flet inferior because of this. Yes, I have done classes on FMQ that were entirely about stippling - there was no other style. I never exhibited any of my work until 2 or 3 years ago because of this, but as I said, I got over it (now I FMQ, but I still don't stipple).

My opinion on this - quilting was originally the method of keeping the layers together. Decorative stitching came later. So when I decided to stick with my basic stitching, I felt I was taking quilting back to its roots. My work is about colour and design first and foremost, and the stitching is secondary. Of course, this is not the case for everyone, and there is room for both points of view. To me, it's a case of "do what you feel is right for the piece you're stitching, and what feels right for you".

What do others think?

Take us for a walk.......or else!

The Twins turn their Evil Eyes on me while pretending to be just one dog. 

WIPs

I am not just famed for my prowess in starting quilts and not finishing them -no, not at all!!!! I also knit the same way. Here are bits of my knitting Works In Progress. Upper left is the hand-painted wool you've seen before, where every ball is slightly different; upper right is the body of the cardigan I'm making for my daughter Sophie (and close to finishing the sleeves); lower left is a jacket made from mohair and recycled sari yarn; and lower right is yet another garment for me. I have also started a couple of little jerseys for children in Mongolia that a charity in Australia organises. 

Red Man Reverse

Solved the tension problem with the Pfaff, so I've done some more thread painting on the Red Man. I like how the reverse looks too. 

Tension Problems

BOTH my machines (Janome 6500 and Pfaff 6270) are giving me tension problems. However, I've managed to do some stitching on the Red Man. 

Snakes & Ladders part 3

I lay awake for a couple of hours last night working out how I would quilt this, so I thought I'd better put it into place as I'm notorious for partly completing work. I've sewn a 10 x 10 grid on it to make it look like a snakes and ladders board, and also quilted a number of red ladders - these represent the high points of our lives - getting a qualification, falling in love, getting married, buying a house, getting promoted, having a family and so on. The snakes represent everything else! Yes, there are far more snakes than ladders, but that's life, isn't it? I'm also going to free motion quilt the areas that aren't already sewn to ensure that all the snakes are fastened down properly.

It's late afternoon now, time for me to stop. 

Naked Men

All REAL artists paint nudes, don't they? And since I'm a single female, I want naked men in my work. Lacking any real life examples that I can cover in paint and roll around on fabric , I've painted up a sketch which I will now stitch over. These are 3 separate bits at present, but will be combined into one. 

Snakes & ladders Part 2

I laid the background pieces out how I wanted them, overlapping where necessary. Unlike many fusers, I fuse onto a backing fabric. These are just sitting on the ironing board while I take each piece in turn and fuse the snakes and ladders on.
What? I'm creative, you can't expect me to be tidy as well!!!!!
Once I've fused all the bits on, I fuse the background pieces together ensuring that there are no bits of the backing fabric showing through. If I miss a bit, I just put another snake over the join. Obviously, this type of quilt is unsuitable for hand quilting as you have quite a few layers of fabric - 4 or 5 in places. I like the extra texture you get from the layers.

I'm not sure that I like how this looks close up - I think it looks much better from a distance, like oil paintings do. 

Snakes & Ladders Part 1

Usually I never think to photograph anything till I've more or less finished it, but as I've had some queries as to how I do things, here's a series of process photos.
I started with fusing strips of various widths, mainly horizontally but with some vertical and diagonal bits too, onto a white background. I almost never work with white, but wanted it in this piece to add additional contrast to the other strong colours. You'll see that there are 4 sets of strips.
Here are the strips chopped into their 4 sets. I've now fused Vliesofix (Wonder Under) to these pieces.
I'm using the same colours from the strips for the background, so that parts of the strips can merge into them. Note that I rotary cut the background pieces - while there's no need for them to be perfect squares or rectangles, the sides must be straight - no scissors cuts allowed.
Here I've started randomly chopping bits from the strip sets to make stripey pieces (very technical term) that form the snakes and ladders. OK, these look like snakes, but the stripes make them ladders as well.

Fraternal Twins

At last I've been struck by a creative mood! Here are my latest babies, the Fraternal Twins. OK, this isn't ground-breaking fiber art, but at least it's a start. They are cut from the same 2 pieces of fabric so are similar but not the same. The strips are only lightly fused in the photo, so excuse the edges sticking up.

And here they are placed together. I could, of course, join them, but because I work in such a limited space (no, I'm not going to show you how small), I am tending to make pieces that fit the space.

For those of you who read my blog and don't see your name appearing in the Links list, be reassured that I actually regularly visit far more blogs than are shown there, but many of them are bookmarked as I just haven't got around to adding them all.

Have I mentioned...

...my slight obsession with sunrises? Taken from my back deck.

Rumours denied

Get yourself in the news by going here.

A brief fling

Like many quilters struggling to find their own style, I had a brief fling with convergence quilts several years ago.

This one hangs in my hallway and is called "Dolphin Dreaming". See how the dolphins are mainly travelling in a clockwise direction? Symbolically, I am one who is going the opposite way. Probably the one in lower right corner who is about to go somewhere else.

Hitting new lows

I confess that I haven't created anything in the last couple of weeks, nor finished any of my many WIPs either. Sigh. I would like to imply that I'm in the grip of a creative miasma, because that sounds arty and everyone knows artists are tortured souls, but the actual reasons are far more ordinary. However, this is not a spill-your-guts blog, and we Kiwis don't tend to do that sort of thing anyway, so please bear with me while I fob you off with photos of old work and the landscape until I can get my creativity out of derailment.

This work (completely finished, I might add) hangs in my living room - it needs a long thin space as it's about 5 feet long. While it's not an original design, having been made in a class about 3 years ago, the centre blocks (representing either fern fronds or geysers as the mood strikes me) are my own design, and the stripey border treatment was my idea.

Thanks to those who have enquired about how my ankle is getting on. While I'm now mobile and driving, I still have a considerable limp and my ankle is still noticeably swollen. From a medical and physio viewpoint, it's all going well but I can't sleep without painkillers.

This weekend, I have my lovely daughter Sophie and her lovely boyfriend Erlo (who is one of the family) staying. Extra nice as today is Mothers' Day.

Baaad weather coming

This morning's sunrise. Pity it doesn't snow here though...