On The Floor

These pictures are from a floor in Powell’s City of Books.

It’s near one of the elevators.

I just thought it was super interesting and textured. Usually stores have such boring floors.

 

So I decided to do a black and white conversion and I like it a lot.

This one even more.

How About Texture

Continuing work on the Stretching Art & Tradition '24 quilt. In my original sketch the centers of each of the seven shapes were grey-silver. Different than the background. My notes included the idea of having some sort of texture. Here is my first attempt with the seven centers made with grey fleece.

Here's one with grey fleece on the right, and on the left, grey suede. (I had grey suede?Huh.) Good, but needs more texture.

Out came the rarely used embellisher aka the needle felting machine.

 This circle is gray cotton fabric with wool roving, suede scraps, fleece scraps and stitching. It's not sewn down yet, so it won't be raw-edged.

The roving color was a little too brown instead of gray on that last one, but I still wanted something else that was wool. Ages ago I bought a bag of wool penny circles in random colors and sizes. I chose the ones that were grey, grey-patterned and embellished them on to one of the fleece circles.

I like it with the wool patterned fabrics.

This one is just pinned on so far, but I'll stitch it down with a zig-zag.

I think I'm really liking how this turning out.

At this point, I'm thinking that I'll embellish one more circle, leave the small one with the suede center, and leave another one of the circles just plain fleece.

 

Closeup on Texture

 

Texture was the theme of the day for the #IGQuiltFest2022 and these are the photos that I posted. They're close-ups of some pieces that have a whole lot of texture going on.

This was many layers of hand-dyed fibers/fabrics which were then machine and hand stitched to add even more texture.

This was a heat-set experiment of polyester fabric gathered around marbles then boiled. It's permanent unless ironed of course. The beading was added after quilting.

Uncovered Designs

I'm always fascinated by what's left behind on the walls of old brick buildings when they're uncovered, like when a neighboring structure is taken down to make a parking lot. I noticed this wall in San Diego and took several pictures. 

I've cropped them so that the walls are the focus, try to ignore the trees, parked cars and lamp posts. 

I think these color combinations, textures and shapes would make a pretty great starting point for a quilt.

Especially once you play around with editing the color so it's not so sun-drenched and washed out. A further thought, what if I turned this design 180°? Then it could be a similar shape/size that I worked with for the Prism Play triptych quilts, 15"w x 45"h. This may require some sketching.

Many Sunny Years

It was 73F yesterday, and brilliantly sunny. Spike took full advantage as he is a gentleman cat of many years of experience.

A close-up of one of the arms of one of our outdoor chairs. So many layers and so much texture. Chair is from the 1940's by the way, so also so many years. For something that's always lived outside, that's kind of amazing.

The yearly pictures of the grape hyacinths have been taken. I was given these by either my mom or grandma when we bought our first house in 1990, and they've bloomed every year since.

 

Painting On Fabric Paper

 Fabric Paper is all the rage these days, and we got to try making it back in May at CQFA I missed the first stage where the actual fabric and paper were combined with thinned down glue.  Basically you use any fabric, in this case just plain white cotton, and you glue down layers of papers, arranging them until you like how they look and you've fully covered the fabric.
When it completely dries, the real fun starts which is where I got to jump in.  Thankfully our workshop leader Sue had extra to play with (thanks Sue) so I got to have a try at it.

 I used craft acrylic paints, some metallic in mixed colors.  Some just brushed on with a sponge brush, but mostly I wanted texture and pattern. So I used the tools I brought with me.  Bubble wrap, carpet protectors, Duplos, lace, bamboo mats.

 The possibilities are pretty much endless, because of the combination of what papers you use and what surface design work you do on top.

 Tissue paper, wrapping paper, tissue paper clothing patterns, any interesting paper is fair game to use.

 Those circles are from a Duplo (giant sized Lego for toddlers) dipped in paint and stamped on.

 The background small dots are from carpet protectors.

Fabric paper is much stiffer than fabric of course, but it is still flexible and somewhat sew-able.  There were several examples of journal covers made with this which look like a good use of this material. There were also wall hangings, notecards and ATC's.

I'm Torn Between Inside And Outside

Bing bing bing almost a 1/5 of the way complete. Here is the 10th in a year long, weekly series of six-word memoir journal quilt(lets).The words say:

"I'm Torn Between Inside And Outside".

Which is a bit of a cheat using the contraction "I'm",but too bad, I can cheat at my own rules now can't I? But I truly am torn between spending time inside vs. outside. Happens every year around this time...As the garden greens up and the weeds go into overdrive, my creative spark is lit anew with the arrival of Spring.

I took pictures as I experimented with coloring a used dryer sheet with some FabricFun dye crayons. After getting some colors down, I first tried to curl it up with the iron, that didn't work. so then I thought maybe it would melt onto some fabric. No luck, just transferred a teeny bit of the color onto the fabric.Ok, fine then, I'll use it as an overlay as part of the quiltlet then.

As I worked with it, the torn edges of the dryer sheet ended up inspiring the words for the week. It looks good stitched down over the shiny green cotton.
Also, you'll notice that my red bobbin thread is showing in-between each stitch. Sometimes I do this on purpose to get tiny flecks of color on a quilt surface, but in this case it was just me being lazy. It turned out that my machine needed to have the bobbin case cleaned out thoroughly (again!). But I liked how it tied together the small amount of red colors in the crazy print in the left hand corner into the whole overall green/blue of the entire piece. So I didn't pick out any of the stitching. Sometimes sheer laziness prompts an interesting design choice!