Hey Again, Valentine!

I know it seems like Valentine’s Day is a long way off, but it’s not!
Remember the stencil-painted & stamped fabric from the other day? It’s now a composition notebook cover:




And a couple of business card holders:



Here’s another comp notebook cover for Valentine’s Day:



This one has a strip-pieced heart that I made into a free-standing applique, then stitched to the cover.

I’m trying to become more efficient in how I make these items for my Etsy shop. Right now it’s taking a very long time to create anything, and I think my wage rate works out to about $2/hr.

The good news is, I’m having fun! But now it’s time to get back to work.

My Journal Quilt

Ok, I’m finally ready to post a pic of my year-long journal quilt project. For this quilt, I made one 6x6” journal quilt every week from my 48th birthday until my 49th (Feb. 2009 to Feb. 2010).
The quilt actually has 56 squares—52 weeks, plus 4 embroidered corner squares that read “Journal Quilt,” “Feb. 2009,” “Feb 2010,” and “My 48th Year.”

As it turns out, creating all the squares was probably the easy part. Once I had completed them, I couldn’t decide on the best way to assemble them.

I considered stitching them to a solid background in a grid. I didn’t want to do that, however, because each square has a hand-written label on the back describing the inspiration for that week’s square.
I thought about adding sashing between the rows and the columns, but I was afraid that would make the piece unbearably wonky.

Finally, I decided just to stitch them all together. Here’s what it looks like at this point:

I’m not terribly happy with it yet. I think the problem is that there is nothing to unify the squares, so it seems a little disjointed/chaotic. I’m considering adding borders to it, but I just can’t decide.

Another thought . . . I could disassemble the squares, stitch them to a background (black, maybe?), then cut away the extra background fabric so that the labels are still visible.

Ideas? Suggestions? I would like to finish this quilt before ANOTHER year has passed!

Imagi(ni)ng Faith

I just finished a journal quilt that is all about questions instead of answers. Since I got sick, I've been struggling with issues of faith. In my past, "healthy" life, I thought I had a good grasp on my spirituality, my beliefs, my understanding of the universe. Since then, though, I've been struggling with questions about how my illness (how I?) fit into the bigger scheme of things.

For some reason, thinking about all these issues brought to mind one of our "wildlife" adventures, blogged about in this post. I kept thinking about those birds, swooping through the garage with their sticks and bits of fluff to build a nest, then with food for those little cheeping babies. I wondered if their diligence required a good bit of faith; living in the wild as they do, do they approach the nest every time with fear that either their eggs or screeching little hatchlings will be gone? Or do they fly confidently back with faith that everything is just as they left it? Maybe both: maybe there's no extracting fear from faith, and vice-versa. Or maybe neither: maybe those birds are just living life day-to-day, doing what it is their instincts tell them to do without thought. Either way, they go on, pushing through every day, and I have no doubt that they'll be back this spring, seeking out the relative safety of our garage.

This quilt started as a mixed-media collage on watercolor paper, using scrapbooking papers, stickers, stamps (rubber and postage), and paints. I then printed the collage onto fabric, cut it up into three pieces, and fused it to the background fabric. I left the edges of these pieces raw and pulled some threads to fray them. I machine-quilted the whole piece, then added the ribbon and, on top of it, the beads (which are pretty hard to see in the pic).

I don't think this quilt brought me any closer to resolving my struggles around issues of faith, but I do find something comforting in thinking about those birds and how they press on year after year in the face of their own struggles. Maybe in some small way, that's what faith is about.

Journal Quilting

I'm taking an online class (Art Journal Quilting) at Quilt University, and this journal quilt is for Lesson 1.

Typically, I work intuitively and just put pieces together, without much thought as to the meaning of a piece or why I'm creating it. Then I wonder why my work doesn't feel meaningful to me. This class is great, though, because it starts out with exercises designed to make you think about the "why" of a piece as you design it.

Here's the description I included on the back of this journal quilt:

"This journal quilt represents an explosive and traumatic illness in 2008 that left me shattered physically, emotionally, and spiritually. The stitching in the quilt ties the fragments together and represents a hope that creating art can be therapeutic and bring the pieces of myself back together again."

This little (8-1/2" x 11") includes commercial and hand-dyed fabrics, reverse appliqué, acrylic paints, machine free-motion stitching with rayon & metallic threads, and Shiva Paintstiks

Since my Quilter's Palette class at Quilt U was drawing to a close, I felt like I should actually USE some of the hand-dyed fabric (this doesn't count the hand-dyed fabric quilted sweatshirt jacket I've been working on for the last month and that will likely be finished around July or August, of course). So I made this little journal quilt to commemorate the class with some of my hand-dyed fabrics, all except the "trees," which are black fabric discharged with bleach. It's interesting how photos play up some aspects of the piece and downplay others; the rings aren't really that prominent in RL, but I stitched them with invisible thread, which the flash reflects off of and makes more visible in the photo. I almost didn't post this because, as usual, I'm now picking the piece apart for all its flaws, but I have to keep reminding myself that these little journal quilts are for experimentation and practice.

Speaking of practice, my hand-quilting is improving! It's all that stitching in front of the television while watching episodes of Lost. We're almost through Season 2 and will probably finish the season this weekend.

The other big project I started this week was a clean-sweep of my home office. I have had enough of paper-slides from my desk, tripping over stuff all over the floor, and not being able to find anything. I started by tossing everything off of my desk onto the floor. We have wonderful cabinets in the office--full of junk, of course, so next I tackled those and cleaned them out. I found all these diskettes and tossed them into trash. Then that evil, never-throw-anything-away-crafter side of me kicked in, and I made the mistake of going online to see how these might be recycled. It turns out you can make all kinds of nifty, geeky things from old diskettes. Sigh. Now they're back in the cabinet, but at least they're stacked neatly in a corner.

Romper Room

I've had to snatch bits and pieces of time for projects this week because I'm so busy at work. I also started the Quilt U Painted Fabrics class, so now I'm painting AND dyeing whenever I get a chance. These pics are from this week's lesson, which was about dyeing landscape fabrics--specifically, skies. I don't have a frame or stretcher bars to pin my fabric to when dyeing with a brush, and I've noticed that laying the fabric directly on the plastic results in the "tiny bubbles" effect, as seen on the blue-sky piece. However, the interesting thing is that these bubbles don't show (or are much less obvious) on the back of the piece (or is this the front?), as seen on the gray-sky piece. Anyway, this is handy because sometimes I might want the bubbles, and other times not. In the fabric painting class, the first lesson was about creating a color sampler using the fabric paints. This was really helpful in getting a feel for how the paints behave on the fabric, as well as for figuring out to make lots of tints, shades, and color mixes.

After all this work, though, I just needed some fun. I was going through some of my saved recordings of Simply Quilts, and ran across the episode with Laura Wasilowski creating a fused piece. This just looked like too much fun, so I had to try it. It was like being a kid again, only this time I got to play with sharp scissors and hot irons!

Back on the Path

I finally got the craft room cleaned and organized and actually have spaces to work!

What I'm working on this week:

My January journal quilt, JUST in the nick of time! This was a lot of fun, since I got to practice beading and embroidery, which I'm terrible at, and used fun things like Shiva Painstiks on the trees.

Fabric dyeing: I forgot to take a pic of the last batch of rainbow fabric I dyed. Now I'll have to see if I can separate it back out since I've already put it away!

Fabric painting with dye: The piece to the left was painted with thin dyes and then discharged with SoftScrub with Bleach through a stencil. I'm going to think about what what the next layer will be for a while before I do anything else with it.

Fabric resist/bleaching: I've been messing with the piece on the right forever. I dyed it turquoise, but didn't like the color, so I added some green. I still didn't like it, so I overdyed it with rust. Then I stenciled on Inkodye resist (and made sea grass with fork tines), let that dry, then rolled SS w/bleach over the whole piece. I finally like it! I think I'll add a little color to the fish next.

The pieces below were painted with thick fabric dyes on dry fabric. I've never painted with dye before, and this was a lot of fun! Though I did have a moment of panic when my dye & print paste mix appeared to be drying out just minutes after I started applying it. I ended up spritzing the fabric with water and worried that it would dilute the dyes, but they seemed to do just fine.

WIPs (or, "Why I'm Pooped")

Things I've been working on . . . thinking about . . . considering finishing . . .

The pic on the left is what is currently hanging on the design wall. A large piece of fabric that I dyed using the rubber-band technique. I'm considering over-dyeing but haven't decided yet. A needle-felted pear on blue jean material, just because I was curious about whether I could do it. A few strips I cut off of the "fire" piece I did a while back in Linda Schmidt's "Elements" class (they were too pretty to throw away; there must be a use for them, right?). A piece of "fabric" that I made by stitching scraps, threads, and ribbons through water-soluble stabilizer. Another piece of "fabric" I made by chopping up scraps and layering them onto ugly fabric, and under some chiffon or organza or something filmy, then stitching all over. The problem with things like this is that, if I put them away, I'll never remember I have them and will never use them. If I don't put them away, they take up space and I still never use them. Sigh. To the right, btw, is the "water" piece I did in Linda's class, still waiting for a border or a frame or some method of finishing.

Other things I've been working on: a piece of fabric I painted with some green colors, then overdyed with rust brown. I stamped sunflowers on and am waiting for them to dry so that I can add details, highlights, and shading with paint.

A crocheted baby blanket that I started for my great-niece, who is having a baby this month (yes, I have a pregnant great-niece, but really, I'm NOT that old; my niece--her mother--is only 2 years younger than me!). I decided to give her a quilt instead, and have been working on this while watching TV; not much good TV lately with the holidays and the writer's strike, so not much progress on the blanket.

January's journal quilt--maybe. I've never done journal quilts, but am considering doing one a month this year. I'm still playing with the idea and with this piece, and while I'm thinking about it I'm embellishing some beads onto it.



And finally, a pattern from a photo I took in Seattle of a stack of rocks. These were everywhere in Seattle when I visited a couple of years ago, and particularly at the parks. I have no idea why people stack rocks, but I was enchanted with them.