The Word for the World is Water

This quilt was just finished recently and sent off to be part of the Dream Rocket Project. It is named "The World for the World is Water" and is 2'x2' and made entirely of recycled fabrics, clothing, and a burlap rice bag.

Here is where I started in the making of this quilt and thought it might be interesting to see how how differently it ended up looking in the end.

Quilted but not yet cut down to size.A closeup of the doll dress. I cut this out when I was a kid trying to make my Barbie a new dress. As you can see I was 3-D challenged even back then..

A closeup of the watery piece near the bottom of the quilt. This blue nylon fabric was a piece of one of my practice flags from back when I was in the tall flags performing with the high school marching band. I liked the way it looked cut up instead of the big rectangle that I started out with.

How Does a Spiral Recycle?

Here is a visual description of how I make my Spiral Recycles pieces. This is how I made #4 in the series.

I start out with a selection of scraps. Usually I am using the tiny strips and edges cut off when rotary cutting, most about 1/2" wide. I start out with a fusible batting piece on a quilt backing.
Here you can see the backing fabric that I've pre-fused so it is nice and flat, acting as one piece for the manipulating coming up ahead in the process.
I spread out the compressed scraps and start figuring out what I've got to work with. Looking for colors and separating out the batting scraps. Since those are white I have to distribute those carefully. I like using a small collection at a time. This keeps it simple and I'm not trying to find the "perfect" piece, I'm limited to working with what I've got right there in front of me in the workspace.
If there are larger pieces of fabric I will put them along the edges of the piece as that tends to be harder to fill in using the method I'm working with here.
Once I've got it all arranged, I place a piece of tulle net on top, pin around the edges, flip over and iron down on the backing side with a hot and steamy iron. The fusible batting holds most of the fabric down enough to work with and the net doesn't melt if I iron from the backing side.

There may be some re-shuffling to do if blank spots have appeared after the ironing process. And I do pin a bit throughout the whole surface, just to make it a bit sturdier during the quilting.
Here it is under the needle. I go back and forth and around and around. Working from the center out to the edge. It gets flatter and flatter, remember this used to be about 1" high before I ironed it!
Then, interruptions!
Back to quilting. I don't want anything shifting around, that fusible isn't going to hold forever once this is vertical on the wall. The stitching lines begin to show through the chaos of the background and give the piece some coherence. As the edges are stitched I fold around the quilt edge the excess net as I'm sewing.
Here is how it looks after lots of stitching. I don't like how that green piece is so outstanding. It is a piece of bias binding and it looks very out of place.
Time to add something else, so I go to the current scraps bin which has pre-quilted edges I've trimmed off of recent quilts. These have the three quilt layers held together with stitching. Adding them on top will give more dimension to the piece.

Using the green bias tape as a guide I start stitching them down, creating a spiral on top of the recycled chaos below.
And here it is finished! Voila' , "Spiral Recycles 4"

Constructing Little Ainia the Amazon

Here we are with another group project that I signed up for and completed this year, through RedDog Scott's Traveler's Hart group.


We were all given the same two vintage photos to work with (courtesy of Lunaea), and each artist also received a fill-in-the-blank storyline.


Mine was: "From the top of ______________, Little Ainia could see ________."


We each completed an art piece, as well as a text card with our line filled in. So that with the whole deck of art/text cards you could make a story. It was really fun to see what each artist did with the Little Ainia character, you can see them all here on the Capolan website.. She has such a fierce, yet child-like expression, I wonder what kind of adult she grew up to become??





To begin I printed both of the pictures out on silk, I wasn't sure which one I was going to work with. The size of the art card is 3x5", so I usually do my art in a 6x10" format and reduce by 50% when copying for the swap. I start with a piece of backing fabric, a slightly oversized piece of fusible batting (Hobbs 80/20), the printed photos and my current working bag of fabric scraps.
I begin making a landscapish kind of setting. The mottled grey reminds me of the granite domes of Yosemite. I liked the grey/black leafy forest print for setting her image against.
I tried out both versions of the photo, but settled on the pointing the spear at you version. The city fabric worked for the city down below the granite dome, and oh look a giant flower compared to the size of the fabric.
But the background of the photo is too big. After trimming it down a bit I'm satisfied and begin quilting.
As this was striking me as sort of graphic novel-ish, I used black thread to outline and stitch, as well as do the edge of the quilt.

This is the text card that I came up with.
My storyline says:
"From the top of the granite dome, Ainia could see the fabled city of flowers."