Quilting & Learning - What a Combo!: Quilting Art Magazine

Showing posts with label Quilting Art Magazine. Show all posts

Sunday, April 05, 2020

BIG Mandala to help heal the world - PQQ 2020

It would seem that the Project Quilting is not quite over. It's been extended to Project Quilting Quarantine (PQQ) 2020! Same fun stuff but with no sponsors and prizes, so that means that it's a little more flexible (good thing because my project is not quite finished!)

A BIG Mandala to help heal the world

A Mandala is the Sanskrit word for "circle". It can be a very sacred if created by monks, but it can also be a wonderful creation to focus meditation. You may have seen them in colouring books for helping to reduce stress.

I created my BIG Mandala as a meditation tool to help heal the world. It would seem that at this particular time, the inhabitants of this small planet we call home are in need of healing...

I'm going to keep this simple since I have 45 minutes to post before the deadline! I'll include more details in my final post, hopefully within a week or so.

Making a BIG Mandala for PQQ

I've been wanting to make a Mandala for a while. The quilted mandala is loosely based on the article, Patchwork Collage Mandalas by Rebekah Meier in the Quilting Arts magazine of October/November 2018 (see Related links below).

In my research, I found that green in a Mandala is the colour for healing the body and that blue is for self-healing (among other things). That's why I chose to highlight these colours, especially in the scallops.

I also used very specific free motion quilting (FMQ) designs to help to keep it simple (to aid in meditation) and to signify healing.

Quilting symbols that could signify life and healing

Creating hand-stitched cording to match the healing colours; adding
green and blue scallops for healing the body and the self; and
FMQ lotus flowers and the eternal flame.

This is the Mandala so far. It still needs some beading, FMQ around the last circle and some trimming around the edge. I haven't quite figured out the exact finish so I'll be posting again with more details once it's finished.

BIG Mandala to help heal the world

What I learned

Well, I still haven't learned to make a deadline when there is an out, but I do want this to be a beautiful finish. I will be using it for meditation.😊

Sunday, September 23, 2018

Blogger's Quilt Festival - Fall 2018

Welcome to the Blogger's Quilt Festival - Fall 2018 hosted by Amy Ellis of Amy's Creative Side.

Connections & Intersections

I've been working on this art quilt for months now, mostly a little bit at a time, until the deadline started looming over me! As much as I dislike that 8 letter word, it does help with motivation. 😊

If you read previous posts, you'll notice that I called it the "Connected by a thread" project, which was the theme for our fibre art pieces. This art quilt was created for the Out of the Box fiber art group's exhibition next summer. When I finished the piece and had attached a label without the title, it came to me - Connections and Intersections. Since the piece is abstract, you can decide for yourself what the title means! 😊😊😊

Connections and Intersections art quilt

I want to tell you a little about how I made this, why it ended up looking the way it does and what I learned.

I'll start at the beginning. When I want to create a piece to fit a theme, I almost never have a problem coming up with ideas. The issue is usually working through the ideas to see if I can pull them off in whatever time frame I have. My first ideas tend to be a little too complicated and at this time in my life, I just don't have a year to spend on one piece.

After discarding a couple of complex and more literal ideas, I decided on a few criteria:

Use my own hand-dyed fabrics;
Make it an abstract piece;
Try a few fun techniques;
Use my knowledge of design theory to put it all together in a cohesive piece.

The background

After picking out hand-dyed fabrics that worked well together, I sewed a few pieces together using improv piecing. Some of it worked and some of it didn't, but I knew that I would use them somewhere, eventually.

The bottom ruffle piece came about when I was trying to sew some of these improv pieces together using curves. In this instance, I overdid the curve, which came out like the sleeve of a garment - the ultimate curve! I decided to keep it and added some fabric underneath. That's how the piece became 3-D.

I finished the 3-D edge with a machine zigzag stitch and then attached little strips of cheesecloth on both sides of the edge. Over this I needle-felted some lovely brown, beige and green wool roving.

The layered circle on the right was created to try out some of Sue Spargo's embroidery techniques (see my first post in Related links below). It was made as a background for some beading.

Here's a picture of the finished 3-D part of the piece which reminds me of a cave. I added the little purple-grey piece that was beautifully frayed and then later embroidered the inside. Doesn't it look like a cozy place to hide out?

The finished "cave"

Woven fabric finished

I then added the woven piece. You can read more about this in my previous post (see Related links).

Woven fabric in progress

Later on, I embroidered along some of the lines to cut up the woven piece since my daughter said that it looked like an amoeba. Hopefully the final version looks less amoeba-like, although I guess there's nothing wrong with amoebas.

The bottom part of the piece

The first extensive stitching was done over the cave. I found some really beautiful variegated embroidery threads and played with straight-ish lines and circles to change it up.

Next I used some lovely wool that I corded on the side and above the cave.

I used a lovely navy wool thread that shows up well for the seed stitches on the purple fabric next to the cave.

Next came the improv beading to top the circles. I've heard of improv beading and seen some beautiful work by members of the Out of the Box group, but I had never done any. So through Google, I found Robin Atkins's blog - Beadlust, and a free downloadable copy of her first book, Exploring Creativity with Beads! This is the result of my first improv beading.

Improvisational beading

You can see also that I added a braided bracelet to accentuate the curving fabric changes. The bracelet was made by either my daughter or my niece. I've been wanting to create art pieces with these bracelets for a long time. I hope that this is the first of many!

Details of the woven pieces and the triangles

I used up the rest of the woven pieces by covering parts of them with felt and then adding an extra strip of needle felting from the cave between them. I finished the strip with French knots.

I also started adding wool felted triangles. I used different embroidery stitches to attach them and then embroidered around them.

Eventually I decided to just embroider triangles to add texture instead of adding more wool felt.

From the beginning I wanted to add the driftwood to this piece. The hard part was deciding where it should go. You can read more about this in "What I learned". It finally made it next to the beads, under the bracelet.

Details of the bracelet, improv beading and driftwood talisman

The idea of creating the driftwood talisman came together when I saw the cover of Quilting Arts Magazine (Issue 91). Victoria Gertenbach, the author of the article, had rocks, bones and shells embellished with embroidery and beads. I wanted to keep the driftwood simple but I added some fabric that I had used in the woven piece and beaded it using some amethysts pieces from one of my mother's necklaces. I added a feather charm for a simple dangling effect. You can also see more amethyst beads to the right of the circle.

Finally I finished the top of the piece with simple embroidered swirls in variegated thread.

Embroidered swirls

The quilt label is part of the improv piecing that didn't make it into the quilt.

Connections & Intersections' improv label

What I learned

After finishing Connections and Intersections, I was so wiped out that I have barely done anything since except read and sleep. Today I'm finally starting to feel like myself and started reading the many, many blog posts in my inbox. That's when I realised that the Bloggers Quilt Festival is on. Honestly that's how I learn about most of these events - by people who are participating. So thank you all for keeping me in the loop, when I finally get around to reading the blog posts I receive!
I almost always ask my kids for feedback on my work. It was so funny to get my son's feedback on this: "I don't know...what's it supposed to be?" I guess he's not the abstract art type! However, my daughter helped me a lot with the design process. Thanks!
As is becoming my habit, I used many photos of this ongoing piece to determine what would come next. This piece was very much an intuitive creation. Since it was abstract, there was no right or wrong, just my intuition, the design principles that I tried to apply and the many photocopies of the ongoing piece with marks and notes.
As I mentioned above, I knew that I wanted the driftwood on the piece but didn't make up my mind until almost the end as to where it would be. I thought that I wanted it at the top, but in the end, it would have made the piece too top heavy, so down it went.
I'm really grateful that this piece end up as well as it did because I have to admit that by the last weekend before it was due, I was so exhausted that I had a hard time with everything. It's probably a good thing in hindsight because it made me keep the driftwood and the embroidery on the top of the piece very, very simple - which is exactly what it needed 😊

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Woven Landscape - Part 1

Did you know you can weave the background of your art quilt with strips of fabric? That's exactly what I did in this project.

Before discovering quilting, I used to be a weaver. I absolutely adored creating cloth, but it's such a long, long process. Since learning to quilt, I've always wanted to somehow incorporate weaving into my quilting. I now know that there are all kinds of ways of doing this - and this is my first attempt.

Quilting Arts Magazine

My background is based on Jude Hill's article in Quilting Arts Magazine (Dec 2015/ Jan 2016). It's actually a reprint of the article from the Aug/ Sept 2010 issue, to celebrate Quilting Art Magazine's 15th anniversary. Happy Birthday!

I decided that I would create the woven background using scraps. I chose primarily neutral strips left-over from my Bali Back Flip quilt and my Orange Peel Table Runner.

I picked the warp strips (the vertical pieces) and taped them to the top edge of my work table to keep them in place. I then wove the weft strips (the horizontal pieces) as closely as possible to ensure that there were no holes in my background. I very carefully slid the woven background onto a piece of beige Kona solid that was slightly larger than the background. Once it was to my liking, I pinned the edges of the background to the solid fabric and stitched them together. It was flimsy to work with, but I took my time and stitched very carefully. I only had to pick out and re-stitch one weft strip that had bunching up.

The beginning of the process

Although I knew that I wanted to weave the background, I didn't know where I was going with this project. Jude Hill's examples in the article are all quite abstract. I tried that, but I'm not quite ready. It seems that my art quilt has to represent something specific and I'm still thinking too literally to add blocks and shapes that have no meaning to me. So, I did what I seem to be doing well - I made a landscape art quilt!

Again, digging into my scraps, I added the beautiful fussy-cut sun and a sky. It's my favourite part. The foreground of flowers and then narrow strips of different teal fabric where the warp and weft meet were the hardest to work on. The strips were supposed to represent trees, but they looked more like tree trunks. I wanted to add something to them, but didn't want to hide the background. I spent more time agonizing over the trees than any other part of the quilt.

Experimenting with the trees

The Trees

In my first attempt at the trees, I used wool and other fibres to create the tree tops. I then covered the tops with green organza to keep everything together. I embroidered around the fibres. After the first tree, I was pretty sure that I didn't like it, but since nothing better came to mind, I kept going. That's the great thing about working with textile - almost everything can be undone, or covered up!

While making up my mind about the trees, I added a few embroidered flowers, knowing that I could finish them later.

At this point, I took a photo of the landscape and printed it up in both colour and black and white. By then, I was a little discouraged because the only part I liked about the piece was the sky. I loved that sky so much, that I wasn't going to give up!

New and improved trees!

Still not knowing what to do, I went on Pinterest to check out different styles of quilted or embroidered trees. Finally I was inspired by my own piece, The Lone Tree.

The Lone Tree

It couldn't be the same because I was only working with the trunk, and I didn't want to make the trees too wide.

I drew a few options for the trees on the printed photos. Once I had an idea of what I wanted, I cut fabric that matched the tree trunks as well as organza for the 5 trees. I used two different colours of organza to give the trees variety and stitched around each of the trees.

At this point, I took another picture to see what I needed to add as well as to figure out how I was going to quilt and finish the project.

What I learned:

Taking photos of the project so far has really helped me "see" the piece differently. It's also great to be able to draw onto the image to try something out.
The woven background was flimsy to work with, but adding the Kona solid fabric underneath added stability - but also thickness. More about that later.
So far I like the woven background. It's adding a bit of whimsy to a landscape that I hope is fun and whimsical!

Please come back soon to see how the project ends! I'll be finishing this piece soon since it will be shown along with some of my other landscape art quilts on April 8 and 9, 2016 at the Fibre Fling 5 Show & Sale with the Out of the Box Artists Group.

I will also be participating in the Art with Fabric blog hop. I'm really excited. This is the first time that I've been asked to participate in something like this on the internet. I see this as a milestone in my blogging life!

So, I hope you'll join me, Alida (our host from Tweety Loves Quilting and MOP Monday Linky Party) and about 20 other quilters on this blog hop. It's from May 9th to 13th, 2016. Here's the link if you want more information.

Linky Parties: Oh Scrap!, Monday Making, Main Crush Monday, Fabric Tuesday

Thursday, August 06, 2015

Inspiration

I'm still making my Monthly Landscape Art Quilt (see below for a peek preview), but for this month's Goal Setting Party at A Lovely Year of Finishes, I'm starting a new project.

Prayer Flags

I was actually going to skip the August goal setting because I wasn't inspired. I just couldn't get into anything - new or old. Not a good place to be. And then I started reading one of my many e-books: Prayer Flags by Quilting Arts Magazine. This was it! This is what my creative soul needs right now.

A project needs a plan to get things going, whether I choose to follow it or not!

Since Tibetan prayer flags, a Buddhist tradition, are hung in groups of 10 and come in 5 colours that represent the five basic elements, in August I'll be making at least one group of 10 prayer flags. Here are the colours and what they represent:

Blue is for space;
White is the air;
Red is fire;
Green is water; and
Yellow is earth.

As Vivika Hansen DeNegre writes in Prayer Flags, "the words and symbols printed on the flags (the prayers) are spread throughout the universe as the flags flutter in the wind. Everyone who is touched by that wind is touched by the prayers. The wind spreads the intentions through the world, extending happiness, goodwill, and peace."

A Prayer Flag Project Button

Quilters have been making prayer flags for many years now. The Prayer Flag Project is "a collective project spreading peace, good will and kindness, one flag at a time..." It's been around since June 2011. Check out the blog for more information on participating and making prayer flags.

After I was inspired, I started making a list of the prayers and the flags I wanted to create - for specific people and ideas. I may be at this for a while. I want to make flags and hang them up in my back yard before winter comes. Since my garden isn't what I would like it to be, it'll be beautified by the prayer flags.

August's Monthly Landscape Art Quilt

It's one of my friend's birthday in August. She requested a landscape quilt of her kayak and gave me a beautiful photo. I hope I can do it justice.

What I learned: