In week three, The Artist’s Way has me focus on Recovering a Sense of Power. The words for focusing are Anger, Synchronicity and Shame. In Watercolor is for Everyone, the daily practice work seems to be mostly representational, as opposed to abstract.
I am also sharing my fiber work from this week. Let’s start with that.
Knitting: I’m a bit errant in not posting about my newest project. I’ve chosen a cowl design by Andrea Mowry. It’s super lovely.
I’ll do a full post on this project next week.
I have also returned to an art quilt that has been languishing since last year. I call it Here be Dragons. This week, I spent my evenings hand-quilting one of the panels.
Bill’s photographs provided the reference for my dragonflies. The background and dragonflies were painted onto white cotton fabric with textile paint and micron pens. Next I embroidered detail on the dragonflies. The final step is to work embroidery stitches into the background as a way to marry together the three layers of the quilt. It is slow work, but I am determined to carry on and get this piece mounted and displayed before year end.
Here are the watercolor exercises completed this week.
This little landscape was based on a photo I took of a Wisconsin farm.
My magical hummingbird is inspired by Janet Weight-Reed’s beautiful hummingbird paintings. I used a photograph from this month’s National Geographic for reference.
I feel like I have been assembling four square blocks all summer long. I have sewn five sets of eight blocks, each set confined to one color in my analogous palette.
Finally, I am nearing the end of the block-building phase. There were two glitches that lengthened the time spent building blocks. Firstly, I ran out of scraps and couldn’t find the colors I needed at Hobby Lobby. This led me to adding color to my white or pale fabrics by painting them with Jacquard Dye-na-flow paint. I painted the featured 4 x 2 and 1/2 strips AND the 1 and 1/4 border strips to get the effects I was seeking. It was kind of fun, in a time-consuming sort of way.
Here is a sampling of some painted strips/blocks in green hues.
I ended up needing painted fabric in blue-violet, teal AND yellow green.
The second issue arose when laid out my blocks. I took an intense dislike to any block that had dark borders. To fix this, I cut apart many blocks and replaced the dark strips with light colored fabrics (mostly were created with paint on white fabric.)
I now have enough blocks to form the five regions of my quilt. I have sewn a center block for each region using black fabric and hand-painted feature fabrics. To create some breathing room between my blocks, I made sashing with black fabric. Believing the black fabric was too boring, I cut the sashing randomly and inserted “sticks” of multi-hued batik fabric. Here is a the “blue-violet” region laid out and ready to sew.
I’m excited to start assembling the quilt, but a little nervous that the pieces won’t fit together properly.
This is the week that Quilting Gail has designated for challenge participants to post pictures of their finished quilts. The Stay At Home Round Robin challenge is in its fourth year. It’s been a fun ride for me, and pure pleasure to see the work of other quilters as they add a border week by week.
It started for me when I chose a center block from a group of experiments that I did almost five years ago. Back then I was teaching fiber arts to a group of home-schooled children. One week I had the students experiment with fabric paint on pieces of a cut-up sheet. The panel I used in my SAHRR came from the example I made, to show the students some of the possibilities of fabric paint.
Four colors of paint were applied in bands horizontally across the fabric and allowed to bleed together. When the panel dried, it looked like a mountain scene to me. I enhanced the image with opaque white paint, paint pens and stencils of pine trees.
The painted panel set the color palette for my SAHRR.
That choice led me on a path which resulted in a quilt about migration. For some time, I had been toying with designing and sewing paper pieced butterfly blocks. Could I make a quilt about the monarch annual migration to Mexico? The time I spent researching this migration led me to think about the wider issues of habitat loss and climate change. Now I had a broader story to tell with my quilt.
The weekly challenges offered by SAHRR quilters helped me to build some structure around my ideas. For that I am grateful.
Here are some close-ups of a few details I added with applique and micron pens.
And here is my finished quilt:
Just a word about the materials used: I was determined to buy nothing for this project, making it entirely with stuff that I already owned. I mentioned the cut-up sheet. In addition, I recycled pieces of clothing such as dresses and men’s shirts. The main fabric, which was used as sashing, was also divided up and painted various colors to carry it into most of the borders. Ultimately, I did have to buy a few quarter yards of black patterned fabric and the quilt’s batting.
Thank you to organizer Quilting Gail and her fellow designers who put together this year’s SAHRR challenge. You can find their work here:
It is the final week of the 2024 Stay at Home Round Robin challenge. In my last post, I had part-way finished the round 5 challenge (the number 4) but was flummoxed by the Round 4 challenge (square in a square). Working many hours on my quilt this week, I managed to sort out and assemble round four, as well as the second side of round 5. If you are following this, I recommend that you get comfortable, because this is a long post.
Let me start by sharing two inspiration photos.
A kaleidoscope of butterflies.
A boatful of refugees.
It’s possible that the connection between these two images isn’t obvious. When I tell you that the theme of my quilt is migration, my choices will make more sense to you.
For at least a year I have wanted to paper piece some butterflies and use them in a quilt about migration. I even went so far as to design three different patterns in multiple sizes. After fooling around with them, I ended up putting them away for a later date. It’s now 2024 and, it’s clear to me that now is the time for the butterflies.
Most of my paper pieced butterflies were in plain blocks. But because Round 4 is square in a square challenge, I used two small butterflies as centers
This border took me almost three days to design and construct, but I don’t regret any of the time, or the mess left behind. The result exceeds my expectations.
Moving on to the top border, which also is included in my Round 4. Here is the shirt I cut up to get the fish fabric.
I wanted to sew the blocks in a manner that gave the illusion of fish swimming upstream. Here is my first attempt, which was a total fail.
To move forward, I did what everyone else does. I looked at other quilters’ work. I noticed one quilter put together a square in square that totally changed the appearance of the block, simply by mixing up the corner triangles’ colors. The lesson: you can use more than one color. Ahhhhh! Out came the seam ripper to completely disassemble my entire border. I threw away all the corners and made new ones. Now I have six square in square blocks that work together the way I envisioned.
Deep, breath – on to my refugees. Using my inspiration photo, I made a sketch that caught the essential elements. Then I turned the sketch into a pattern. Because the shapes of the people are not straight lines, this part of the design was not made by paper piecing. It was appliqued to a background of sky and water.
The finished block is 12 x 6 inches.
And if you look closely, you can see how I met this week’s challenge by adding the lettering that appeared in the inspiration photo.
I wrote the words with a purple fabric pen.
This morning, I threw together several four-patch blocks to fill in the right side of the quilt. And while it’s not completely sewn up, and two corners need transition blocks, this quilt top is close enough to a finish that I can post it on the linky party site.
MIGRATION WORLD
If you are still with me, thanks for reading all of this. It felt important to me to share my process. Maybe it’s a way to clear my mind for what may come next.
This week’s Linky party is hosted by Kathleen McMusing. Visit her to see the quilts of other participants.
Daily Fiber 