A bit of this & that

Lots of different things done today - first, I finished off the wonky shoo-fly blocks for the lotto. When it's light tomorrow, I will photograph all of them together for the block lotto blog - but it's too dark at the moment and anyway, too much effort! Some work better than others in terms of contrast, but in all, they should contribute to a nice, funky quilt or two.



I also put this together - this is a collection of Dear Jane blocks, 6", in Civil War Repros, which Cathi and I have been swapping for a while. We decided a while back to stop and DO something with the blocks, so today I dug them out and put them together. This will be a wall-hanging once it's quilted - not sure how I will do that yet, probably fairly simply, but it will definitely be by machine, not hand!





And finally, this is a project I am working on with my dyeing & surface art group - a fractured houses project. The top photo is the inspiration for the project, while an enlarged version of the line drawing is what we will work from - below the row of Dutch canal houses is approximately 8" of water, above is sky. The idea is that each person (there are 10) will make all 10 houses (separated), and then they will be swapped out so that each person gets a house from each other person. We can then join them up together. It's quite a large project - each house strip (including sky and water) is 33" high, and anywhere between about 6 and 12" wide. I started work on the far left house ("a" in the diagram) today, working on the water. Originally I was just going to use some strips of shibori fabric from my scrap basket, but didn't have quite enough to cover the area, so I ended up doing lots of piecing and patching. We all were given one piece of a common fabric, some of which has to be included in each house, somewhere. In house A, I think I am going to use it behind the windows; we'll see.



The project isn't due to the swap hostess's house until November, but time always runs out on these things, so I want to work on it in little bits and pieces through the year so it doesn't overwhelm me. I think it's going to be great fun, but a lot of work, too. And goodness knows what I'll do with the finished piece, which will be rather large!

We are working mostly in hand-dyes or altered fabrics, and should follow the shape of the houses, but otherwise, there is a lot of freedom in terms of colour (the colours in the first photo are irrelevant), style and method. I'm hoping to do a variety of things with my houses. We'll see. We can also embellish some, though not too much, as we will want to do that sort of finishing to our own pieces, once we have joined them all up...