Gotta Dance!

When I hear a great song on the radio I just have to dance! I dance while cooking dinner, cleaning the house, ironing, you name it. I " chair" dance in the car to a great tune! When I first saw the challenge was " Exuberance" I had to admit that I was stumped at first. But nephew commented on how much I loved to dance so I decided this was a great place to start.

I had hubby snap a few pictures of me dancing around my sewing room, then I chose a photo I liked and got to work. First I printed the photo, traced my silhouette then dug thru my hand dyed fabrics I choose the background from my iced dyed fabrics and the figure is from fabrics I dyed for a class I took a few years ago. Once I had the piece fused and quilted it still looked a bit plain then I remembered some beads I was given earlier this month, they where the perfect colours so I got busy hand sewing all the beads and sequins on. 

This piece makes me smile and I hope you feel like dancing with me.

Semi-Detached Structure

SEMI-DETACHED

... or OMG! 

I completed a challenge! 

Meet Semi-Detached. 

I made the leaves about six weeks ago and left them alone until they provided the "I should do something with these" impetus needed to create Semi-D. Semi-D is created mainly from silk dupioni, which doesn't photograph very well, MistyFuse, and Timtex. I like the rigidity of Timtex, which gives the piece "structure". 

The tree-branch is made from Timtex and heat-activated, moldable batting, giving the tree-branch a slight three-dimensional curve. According to the packaging, the moldable batting gives rigidity and stiffness for handbags and totes. A fun product, and I shall try it again for something. 

The Timtex and moldable batting were covered in brown silk dupioni and cords made from silk embroidery floss,  Kreinik braid, and metallic knitting yarn (the stuff that looks like a ladder) were attached with a zig-zag stitch. The edges were left raw for a little bit of texture.

I should have used a much firmer quilt batting than bamboo, and next time I will quilt the backing and top before attaching such heavy add-ons. In order to keep some of the leaves from flopping around, and to secure the base of the tree-branch, I used some "450 Quick Dry Adhesive" - it's clear and dries very quickly. Some of the leaves are raised from the surface with large beads, which are glued to the background and to the leaf itself.

While I was writing this, my husband was vacuuming my sewing room (Yes, he really was!) and found something I thought I had lost. So I added it to Semi-D.

As a bonus (and because I haven't kept up!), this is a photo of Stream - the piece I used for inspiration when I made the leaves. Stream is over two feet long, and is over seven years old!

Ready for the next challenge!