Tuesday, May 31, 2011

A quick look

Well, I guess everyone has been busy with sketching, planning, and mulling over ideas.  Either that or everyone is finished and just waiting for reveal day.  So here I am...fabric still in one piece, plan laid out on paper and just getting ready to finally start construction.  Just to keep your curiosity up, here is my colour palette, or did I give too much away?


What do you think?

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Peek-A-Boo

Thought it was time to check in and find out how everyone is doing.  Just in case you might be wondering, here is another clue of what game I'm playing.


If that one doesn't help, how about this one....


Till the reveal day then on June 15th.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Starting

Well, the experimentation has begun. Printing on commercially prepared printer fabric (cotton and silk), Sheer Heaven and cheap muslin has yielded varying results.



Coaxing a pdf file into a tif file, resizing it and adding color in appropriate places has also been a challenge.

The question: Will it all come together?

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Good on you Lisa

Just thought I should tell you all about Lisa being featured on C&Ts Creative Troupe round up for April.
They featured her 'Sunrise on the mountain' quilt.
You can read the article, here.  I really love the abstract quality of this landscape and hope some of this ability magically transfers itself to me.  Great work Lisa!

Monday, May 2, 2011

A few clouds on the horizon

Here are my first samples for my challenge piece.  I have been very lazy, or simply procrastinating as these have been on my desk for a week or two.  These are samples of the sky I am going to put in my piece, they are based on this photo.
The first sample is needlefelted.
The needle felting gives it a fluffy look.  On the right, I simply felted onto cotton with the white and tried to get the bumpy bits right.  On the left, I put down some pale blue before felting in a more loose manner.  This looks more natural and gives the fluffy edges to the clouds.
My second sample is appliqued and thread painted.
I applied sheer organza in layers using my heat wand with a very fine point (and not a high heat).  This allowed me to attach  the sheer and to get all the fiddly little bits on this cloud.
Then I simply threadpainted in circles all over the clouds, going over the edges a little bit to make it a bit puffy.  I can see in this picture, that I need to do a little more thread painting to merge the edges of the organza, but this is not  as obvious in real life.
Anyway, here are my first samples.  The reason I used this photo was that I liked all the little bits on the edge of the clouds.  These are totally impossible to do at this scale with an embellishing machine, but the felted clouds are more natural.  What do you all think?   There will be a lot of other thread painting, so the felting would add more texture, but I do like the thread painted one.