Kathy's Celestial

For my celestial piece, started with white fabric and dyed it a soft blue. I selected  four different colors of Jacquard Dye-Na-Flow for each color, I ironed creases into fabric to form a star-like impression.

I loaded up a paint brush with Dye-Na-Flow and lightly moved it along the top of the creases until the paint had been used. I repeated the process for each of the four stars.

After the dyeing process, I machine echoed stitched around the stars.

Lastly, I hand embroidered each of the stars with a contrasting colored embroidery thread.

Enjoy! Kathy

CELESTIAL EYED GOLDFISH by Gladys Love

When this theme was announced, I immediately thought of moons, stars, planets, the milky way, and other galaxies.  I also thought of two people I know with kind of "celestial" personalities....lovely, gentle, sort of ethereal persons who constantly amaze me with their ability to see life as magical. 

However, since I don't have that kind of personality.....I had to really think to come up with something that would fit this theme.  I googled images for "celestial" and got many many that would fit in with what I had been thinking.  And then one popped up that made me laugh and I thought it was perfect. It made me happy! It was a "Celestial Eyed Goldfish".  Here is the photo that I worked from. 

I have had the great pleasure of taking a class from Carol Shinn (http://www.carolshinn.com/) who is well known for her thread painted works of art.  I decided that would be the perfect way to present this little fish.  It was printed onto canvas with an ink jet printer, and away I went, stitching in all the colors and trying to duplicate his comical expression.

 

I wasn't happy with the way his tail was not visible so I took artist's license and drew it in.  Here it is partially done. 

 

I was quite happy with the way this looked and continued filling in the tail.  I had a little helpful input from my son, who raises koi, as to the colors in the "fantasy" tail.  I learned from another project that it was important to do the eyes first or they look terrible after all the other work is done and then your project is wasted.  So the order of work was the eyes, the body, the background and then the tail. 

I was quite pleased with how the canvas flattened out behind the fish as I progressed with the colors.  A learning experience as I made some of the stitches go different directions and I think this helped.  When all done, I cut him out of the canvas so he was a free form "patch" that I could apply to a 12 x 12 background. 




The background is a technique learned from my friend Joan, who did one of our challenges with strips of old silk.  We had split two skeins of these strips between us so I decided to use all my "watery" colors for the background.  Here is what it looked like as I played with the
background.  I was dissatisfied with the white edges showing.  I had carefully trimmed the canvas away and then pulled out the warp threads to give it the thready edge, but the canvas color made too much contrast with the background for my liking.

So out came the fabric pens and I colored the front and back of each section to match the thread beside it.  This was better.  I was quite happy with the look of the silk so did some free motion quilting to fasten it down, added some embellishments and here is my "Celestial Eyed Goldfish".

 

And here is a close up of the threadwork, and a photo taken of it flat to show the three dimensional effect in the eyes and tail. 



I think my beading is not random enough so I may be adding more to make it look more natural.  I'm told random beading is the most difficult!  Apparently that's true!   Now, on to LOVE! 

TEA TIME by Diane B.

a Whimsical Challenge

I started working on this challenge with thoughts of a fancy cat design but found it needed to be in a vertical format.   On to more thoughts and I came up with this idea.  

I never do fusible type quilts so this method was fun for a change.   The floral fabric was from a friend’s stash.   The background was quilted on to Timtex and most of the design fused then stitched on.   An enjoyable project.

JUST A TOUCH OF WHIMSY by Karrie Phelps

I have to say this really was a fun challenge! It was great to not take this piece to seriously and just have fun. The Comox Valley is known for its Glacier so I decided to "dress the Glacier" up a bit. 

I threw in a few of my favorite colours and decided to add a whale (I was going to add a flying pig made of wood but decided he was too large and the whale didn't need company) this is all fused on top of a pieced base - two fabrics the sky and water. Just a few tippy trees and Voila! 

I LOVE TURTLES by Margaret Kelly

The 12 x 12 group topic this time was "Whimsical" ......."I love turtles". Of course I had to eat the chocolates first :)

I then heat shrunk the wrappers and attached to black background fabric for the body of the turtle. That cost me a few needles, let me tell you! Head and legs are also of black fabric with copper painted on for contrast to the dark background.  I drew faintly on the background where I wanted to place the turtle, then attached the heat shrunk cellophane (floral wrap) to show bubbles in the water.  Also the background is actually 4 small pieces of my hand dyed gradation fabric sewn together.  After the "bubbles" were sewn down, I added the quilting lines.  And finally I added the turtle, binding etc. 

Now...... where did I put that other box of chocolates.....

The Next Challenge

Time for a new challenge.    

What fun to be able to pick one.

The next challenge topic is 

"Whimsical"

Something happy or fun.

Something to make you smile. 

Funky.    Fanciful.

Have fun with this one.

Create something wild and wonderful.

March 31^st  2013   is the due date.

Incandescence by Joan

Incandescence Challenge:

Hi everyone:  I know I am late, late, late, but here it is.

When the theme “Incandescence” was announced, I thought of heat, reflected light, Northern Lights, sun, moon and a lot of other things that might work

I have always loved Northwest Native Art. I have a couple of carved bracelets, one the sun and the other the moon. I looked at both of them, and put together a sketch incorporating some designs from each. The other thing I have wanted to do for some time is work with metal, adding it to fibre. Voila! I thought, a copper sun/moon.

This is my sketch...

I enlarged the sketch, then traced it on to copper shim with a stylus. I didn’t like the narrow line that resulted. To make the embossing thicker, I glued and taped kitchen string to the back of the copper, in the narrow lines, and used a paper blender to push the copper down and around the string. I liked that effect.





 I then mounted the copper on to Tim Tex by curling the copper around to the back of the Tim Tex. It worked, but I do need more practice.

Now that I had what looked like a trivet, I had to figure out how to mount it. I thought black was the way to go to show up the copper color so I  made a quiltlet, couched heavy metallic thread with a fine copper thread to look like rays. Now to attach the two pieces - Pippa said “why not attach it by hand”, and so I did, with black Perle cotton.

Meet my CopperFace.

Once I got into it, I loved the process. I think I'd  like to do play some more with metal on fabric.

Incandescence by Kathy K.

It is during our darkest moments 

that we must focus on the light.....

It is the end of the second quarter for our Up for a Challenge 12 x 12 Art Quilt creations. The challenge topic is Incandescence.  This topic, at first, stumped me; after some thought, I turned to quotes which turned things around for me.  My final piece is below:

I started with white fabric and dyed it in stages from yellow to orange to red to violet.  I then used Fabric Etch to create long rays emitting from the center.  I placed black felted wool behind the fabric and begin hand-embroidering and continued hand-embroidering.  I have been to the doctor's office and hand-embroidered, then to the dentist's office and hand-embroidered, onto Panera's and hand-embroidered.  Literally, for the past few weeks, this project has gone everywhere with me and, you guessed it, I hand-embroidered it.  I hand-painted the quote and ended the top by placing a beveled piece of glass at the center of the yellow section (and, yes, it is securely attached). Finally, it is edged with a velvet border.

I enjoyed creating this piece and am looking forward to the next topic being announced tomorrow! Enjoy!

INCANDESCENCE by Dale Kathryn

From 69 to 12

(From the Moon to Mars)

I can't remember when/how I decided that it was time for something completely different - but out came my  Embellisher for this challenge. I machine-felted chopped up bits of sheer polyester fabric, metallic ribbon and fabric, and silk fabric to strips of black Kunin felt. When I was pleased with the overall strip, I attached the next strip. If I didn't like a section of the strip, I removed it. The first section is in the centre right of the following photo.

 

As I continued to build on the strips, I got more and more excited with the possibilities. I over-layed and under-layed the metallic ribbon before needle-felting it - which left a trail of little sparkly bits throughout the house.  

Of course, I did an oops, and trimmed about 1/4 inch too much off one side.

After I did that, I added some hand- and free-motion stitching and then some semi-precious chips, glass and metallic beads. The edges are just a few rows of black satin stitch. Bamboo batting and Kunin felt backing (which you are NOT allowed to see!)

And here it is ... Curiosity.

Thanks for the great theme, Barbara!

Manhattan IS an Island!

The year 2009 was a very special one in my life.  The publishing of my first book, followed by a trip to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for spring quilt market, and that followed up by meeting two very good friends in New York City for 5 days.  An absolutely fabulous time that left an indelible memory and set the bar very high for anything to match it! 

When the theme "Island" was chosen, and it wasn't my first choice....we can thank Joan for this one, I had so many ideas that I didn't know where to start. Joan knows.....she heard about all of my ideas....seagulls on logs, grandmas with babies in their lap, etc.  Procrastination being one of my stronger character faults.....I thought and thought, but there was no action.  It was an easy theme for someone who lives on an island (Vancouver Island), and especially when that someone knows people who live on even more remote islands which she gets to visit regularly!  There were also the predictable "No Man is an Island" phrase....and you should have seen the man I was going to create....but I digress! 

I was pondering between three of what I thought were really good ideas when one of the friends I met in Manhattan and I went for a long beach walk here at home.  She wiggled her eyebrows and said "Manhattan is an Island"......and smirked.  That was it.  I loved the idea.  So here it is. 

This is a collage/improvisationally pieced/bead embellished/thread painted and quilted representation of some of my favorite things in New York City.  There are so many more!  But I chose these from my photographs, printed them on fabric, pieced them into pieces of sari silk (yes I shopped where Joan did), clothing, hand dyed fabric, lame and best of all, some words (Manhattan, Times Square, Grand Central & Broadway) are from commercial fabrics purchased at City Quilter in NYC!  

I love to embellish my work, and in this project I worked with individual sequins and learned how to lay them out in a line.  Not my favorite enterprise, but they seemed just right to represent the marquee lights.   I used some square sequins that are meant to represent windows on the NASDAQ building, and trimmed them to varying sizes to fit with the shape of the building in my photo.  I have more embellishing to do, but this could go on forever so I thought I better just post it as it's close!  I want to add some thread painting and a few more beads.