Cross Stitch Update

Had a bit of stitching time this week and managed to get through some of the bottom border (need to do a couple of stitches in the teacup), finish up the queen's head and crown, work the key (very pale) on the right and start on the branch, on which the Cheshire cat will be sitting.

ATC Tuesday

Three more cards which I made with house shapes. This one has fish, 

this one has some Buddhist monks, 

this is a kind of Day of the Dead theme. You can do anything with houses...

Revisiting my Journal Quilts, Week 11

This journal quilt was partly an exercise for an online class about colour and mood.  There wasn't a lot more to it than that, but I think it came out well.

ATC Friday

Another couple of sets of round robins. These are both sets of cards where I was the second person to work on the card, which means you can see the original card (below) as it was when it came to me; the way it looked when I'd added something (two below) and finally, how it looked after the third person added something and I got my finished card above (above). 

This card follows the same pattern - originally card as I received it below, after I'd added it at the bottom and the finished card is above this text...

Cross Stitch Update

Well, she's got most of a head, now. It's progress!

ATC Tuesday

Three more house shaped ATCs. These are all my work, not round robins, with various bits from my stash. 

Revisting my Journal Quilts, week 10

(Journal Quilt no 10 completed on 26 January 2008)

This quilt had no particular theme - it just started with a fabric sandwich and grew from there. I first  filled it with a number of free motion quilting patterns in different threads - some of them inspired by the ideas in Dijanne Cevaal's book, some of them just off the top of my head.

Then I added some stuff - just whatever struck my fancy. There's a transparency, held down by some heart-shaped brads; a bit cut from an old postcard; a bit of an old mobile (the metal figure); some polymer clay pieces, a bead, a flower and some sequins. I think I will either bind it or finish the edges, but for the moment, it's more or less done.

Block Lotto!

After a period of inactivity, the block lotto is back for 2018. Which is great, as I often enjoy making blocks for it - either to enter into the drawing, or just for fun, to donate to the pot.  Because I've been pretty good at getting rid of block sets and not making new ones, I will actually enter the draw this month; if I win any blocks, they will make a cute Project Linus quilt or two. Not familiar with the Block Lotto? Check it out, it's great fun.

Another finished baby quilt

This one is for our neighbours, who were due around the 20th (today), but actually had their little girl a few days ago.  Good prompt to get the binding stitched down, I guess!

ATC Friday

This is a set of cards which I started as below - with pics of cauliflower. It was added to by two other people and I think it came out really cute!

Another one which I started, and again, added two by two further people.

Cross Stitch Update

Only got a very little done on this, this week - probably just one evening's stitching. But some progress is better than no progress, and perhaps, eventually, the Red Queen will actually get a head (it's fitting, somehow that she doesn't have one yet....)

ATC Tuesday

On my swapping forum, I subscribed to a thread for swapping house shaped ATCs - the basic size is the same, in that they fit within the 2.5x3.5" rectangle, but you cut part of the card away to be shaped like a house. Or a birdhouse. A doghouse. Whatever. These are three I made for swapping. 

Revisiting my Journal Quilts, week 9

(Journal Quilt no 9 completed on 16 January 2008)

This week's journal quilt also serves the purpose of being an exercise for the class with Laura Cater-Woods I mentioned with the week 8 quilt. One of the assignments was to take the image we worked with last week and develop it in a new way - either by changing colours, media, making it 3-D, or a variety of other options. So I decided to play with the tree using different media - in the end, this had the result of also changing the colour and making it somewhat 3-D. Originally, I had thought to use some yarns couched down to form the shape of the tree trunk and branches - when I had a peep in my yarn drawer I found something better - silk super crunchies, which I bought from the Thread Studio at the Knit and Stitch show. I don't really know how to describe these - they are hard (crunchy) fibrous stands of silk, hand-dyed, in this instance in lovely autumnal colours. They couched down nicely into a tree shape, and the build up is quite nice - very tree-trunk like. The background of the piece is a piece of discharged fabric from my recent discharge swap, and the buttons just add some colour and movement. I am claiming artistic licence to allow for the fact that they are all from different species of tree...

Successful shopping...

Today I went to the Quilter's Sale & Quilt Show at Farnham Maltings - I go every January, as there are quite a few vendors there getting rid of older stock for somewhat bargain prices (anything from £3/metre to the more common £5 or £6 and up).  It's an excellent place to get backings for quilts, without quite so much cash outlay. I went with a list of all the quilt tops I currently own which don't have paired backings (except one older, really big one, which I'm not really interested in finishing up any time soon). There were 10 on the list. I came back with suitable backings for all of them. A good start to the quilting year. Hopefully that will bode well for the year!

Here they all are, paired up with the tops. The one above is small quilt/baby quilt sized. 

This one of course didn't come out well, colourwise, being purple. It's more warm in tone. The quilt is scrappy, but I think the background is a good match.

Baby quilt size with hand-dyes; the batik backing will suit very well. 

This is quite a small quilt, what's show is a quarter, and I bought the bolt end of this fabric, so I'll have some leftover to do other things with.

This one doesn't show well - it's a taupe colour with small blue dots. 

As the quilt top looks quite "stained glass" I thought the  back suited it well.

This one is African fabrics on the top - the backing is black and brown and isn't African, but has a similar sort of feel to it.

These squares are of hand-dyed fabrics, with some signature squares, from a swap with group I used to belong to. I wanted something with an interesting colour tone for the background, but not handdyes...

This has a lot of Hawaiian shirt fabric in it, along with strong tonal colours; the backing is pretty in-your-face but it seemed quite Hawaiian in some ways.

A nice strong brown to go with these autumnal prints; the colours are actually quite tricky. I was hoping for something in the olive green tone, but couldn't find anything suitable. The brown is very pretty, though.

And finally, this doesn't go with any of my quilts, but it was very inexpensive and will make a nice addition to my Project Linus stash.

ATC Friday

This is another set of ATCs - in this case, altered playing cards - for a Pick-a-Theme Swap.  Here, the players requested a theme and a specific card, as they are probably building a deck of cards all with the same theme.  The top one was an Alice in Wonderland theme, specifying NOT to use illustrations by the most common illustrator. I took my piece from an illustration by Carroll himself.

This one had a German shepherd theme.

This one wanted birds starting with P. 

And a simple Vintage person theme. 

Finished Baby Quilt photos - finally.

Gave this quilt to its new owner a while back, but I had forgotten to take photos of it with the binding on. Luckily, she kindly snapped some pics for me and sent them along. And now I'm finally getting around to blogging them...

ATC Tuesday

Some more buddy cards -- cards started by one person and finished by someone else.  This set of cards with bugs was started by someone else and finished by me. 

And this set, was started by me and finished by someone else.  It's a great exercise, as two people will almost never have the same idea for how to add to a card, so you often get things back which you'd never have considered doing yourself, but which are actually perfect - I think this is a good example of that.