Treasure Bags

I haven't been completely quiet.  I've been making some "treasure bags" for the folks organizing the Canadian Quilters' Association conference taking place in Penticton BC this year in May.  This is the result of some of the stitching.

 

Below is a detail of one of the bags.  I used some of the decorative stitches on my Pfaff.

 

Now I just need to get them into the mail so that they arrive on time.

A little fabric, a little paint, a little Rossi

As mentioned in a previous post, I also took a class from Lonni Rossi while at Asilomar at the Empty Spools Seminars.  We dabbled is all sorts of surface design.  Painting, silk screening, stamping, discharging.  The fun part was coming up with, and making, our own tools to print with. 

I started off a bit slowly, some would say hesitantly (is there such a word?).  Anyway before I know it I was having so much fun that I lost track of time.  We all used so much paint that we had to place an emergency order to Dharma Trading.

Here are some of the pieces that I painted.  This is the first one included a wash of paint and some silk screens.  Don't know if you can see it, but I also used an unusually shaped potato masher (those are the circular markings).

 

This next picture is of the piece of fabric that I had underneath the first one.  It initially only had the blue wash on it.  I added some additional silk screens and also stamps. 

 

Now with a bit more confidence with the technique, I created the next piece.  A bit lighter on the background blue wash, a larger number of  the silk screen prints and a few prints with the potato masher

 

Then I changed up on the background colour and borrowed a different silk screen from a fellow student and came up with this piece. Oh yes, I also made good use of the cap from my water bottle.

 

 

Next came some discharging.  I didn't know that discharge paste could create such an awful smell but for the result that I got, I'd hold my nose again in heartbeat.  The result was well worth it.  Check these out!

 

This black cotton discharged with screen prints and a potato masher.

 

 

This velvet discharged with a home made wooden square and wooden spool. 

 

 

 

And there you have it!  Lots of fun.  Still deciding how I want to use these.  Till the next time, keep creating.

Time flies...

and before you know it an entire month has gone by.  It has been that long since I posted and my only excuse is that my muse took a vacation and then I took one right along with it.

So now that Spring has finally "sprung" and the muse has unpacked, it's time to get back to creating.

I attended Empty Spools Seminars again this year and enjoyed a class with Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry.  Yup that is an addition to her name; she recently got married, but I digress.  I also took a class with Lonni Rossi, but more on her class later.

Caryl was an amazing teacher.  She shared her technique for piecing curves, designing curves with flying geese and ultimately explaining how she came up with her various abstract design ideas. 

She took us through a series of samples that we were to make before we attempted our final piece.  Here are some of the samples I did.  The first one was to test the placement of colour to create "luminosity" and stitch multiple seams together.

 

I wasn't as successful as I would have liked.  The second sample was to test piecing multiple curves within a piece.

 

Having used Caryl's piecing technique it was time to try several other piecing samples. 

Caryl had us draw a simple curve and add triangles to it so that they appeared to float within the curve.  I had a bit more success with this one.

For our final sample we were to select a picture from a magazine and using the colours within the picture, create a sample that included a curve and luminosity.  This is what I did.

 

I'll post later this week to show you what my final project is looking like.  Till then,

 

Enjoy each day, sing like no one is listening, dance like no one is watching and create like you dream.