Island Girl

Another 6" x 8" piece completed.  I put this on the bed of my scanner rather than taking a photo.  Maybe better for small pieces.  This girl is modest-the vine covers her private parts.  I love this image-the only female petroglyph found on Kodiak Island.

SAQA auction quilt complete!

My SAQA auction quilt is complete and in the mail.  It is called Homeward Bound and is 12" x 12".  The auction is held online in September and supports a wonderful organization.

The fabric was dyed wrapped, tied and scrunched around a piece of rope.  Then I printed with a wine cork stamp and textile paint.  The fish were printed using Daniel Smith relief printing inks.  Next I quilted, then added bias strip and bead embellishments.  Below you can see a closeup.

More printing and small quilts

As I said in my last post, I have been making some small quilts from the prints I made but had not had time to photograph them.  Here they are.  I really like these terns that I added to the mountain print.  This piece has potential.

 The two versions of terns that I have carved.  As you can see, the style is quite different and the scale is too similar.  Try again!

 I just started cutting and adding strips to this salmon print.  I like it so far, but we will see where it goes from here.  Below are some of the small quilts that I have completed-all done except for titles and labels.

 I thought this was a great idea, but now I am not so sure.  The small piece is just pinned at this point.  I am thinking.

 This is the piece I did after the Vicki Pignatelli class.  It still needs edging.  I didn't like what I did in the class at all.  When I got home and put it on my design wall, I could see the glaring errors and didn't like the piece enough to take it apart and fix it.  So I went on and made this.  The technique has potential.

I guess I tend to go totally overboard when I get out the inks to print.  Then I have all these little pieces that I feel compelled to carry on with.  I learn something new with each piece and my quilting is ever improving if I just keep at it.  These little print pieces are great for practice and to keep me working when time is a premium and I can't be working on something more ambitious.  Two more quilts that need to be quilted.

More Small Work

I have been experimenting with some different finishing techniques with this latest group of small quilts.

This rockfish is, once again from a printing workshop I took last Spring.  I fused the purple organza before printing the fish.

I wish I had used a darker and heavier thread for the branch quilting on the outer part of the piece.  I got good texture, which I attribute to the wool batting.  I also thought the spray of beads across the piece is effective.

The fabric in this quilt is one of the first pieces of fabric that I dyed.  The mountains were printed.  I really fell in love with my Bernina quilting the sky.  My Viking ate metallic threads like this.  I was so happt with the way the machine was reacting, that I forgot to stop and change color of threads where I had intended. The image in the sky comes from petroglyphs of drawing by Kodiak Island's earliest residents.

Another Northern Lights quilt from the same piece of dyed fabric in the quilt shown above.  I quilted differently and followed the quilting motifs with beads.

One more very small Northern Lights quilt.

I did the same quilting on the outer border of this quilt as I used on thea bird quilt shown above.  Once again, a heavier thread with more contrast would have been more effective.  I am scared to use threads with high contrast.  I grabbed a piece of cotton batting when I layered this quilt and I think that the difference in loft is amzing.  I prefer the look of the wool batting to the cotton.  This quilt I sewed on rickrack to the quilt before I faced the entire quilt with a piece of backing prepared for fusing.  I am not entirely happy with the way the corners turned out, but with more experimentation, this will improve.  All of these pieces have fused backs, and with the exception of the final quilt, have fused bindings, which i have decided are great for very small pieces, but in the future, I will put a traditional binding on pieces that are 6" x 6" or more, like the larger Northern Lights pieces and the bird pieces. 

Valentines

I have not been idle even though I have not posted in months.  I don't know exactly why I am doing this anyway.  I do have a couple of larger pieces in the works, but most recently I have been working on these little valentine quilts.  I carved the stamps and played around with the various paints that I have.  I really was surprised at how the paints layered-sometimes the first paint acting as a mask to subsequent layers.  I added some beads, fused a quote on the back, and applied a fast and dirty fused binding that I am not totally satisfied with but these are valentines, not great works of art.  Some day one of my grandkids will open a box full of all these silly things that I have made for them over the years and call to their brothers and sisters, "Hey, come see what I found!  Can you believe that crazy old Grandma made all this stuff."

Part of the exercise was to test my new sewing machine.  When I was in Anchorage for New Years I purchased a Bernina 440 QE. I have waited years for this.  I knew that I needed a Bernina but could never justify the expense before now.   I really have been to busy to play with it much-I have felt very virtuous that I have been tending to business rather than playing!  This project gave me a chance to play around with the stitch regulator.  It will take a while to become accustom to using that.  I knew that I loved my machine when I start using different metallic threads and she didn't eat them!

Anyway,  Happy Valentines Day to all of my friends.