Quilting Takes Priority

Despite my desire to do something more free-form the need to make progress with making blocks for our Sampler Quilt has to take priority at present.

The Strip Rail Block is completed as shown here and today I have also finished a Dresden Plate Block.

I like it more now I have quilted it.
When the patchwork was complete I decided to quilt the plate in the centre of the block with stitch-in-the-ditch using invisible thread.

But the surrounding background was still looking incomplete so I quickly free machined around the plate with some circular and wriggly lines then it suddenly had an almost 3D appearance, lifting the plate from the background.

It's easier to see the idea on the back.

At our Quilting Arts Group we have planned to make next month a Drunkard's Path and a Spider's Web Block.  After that we'll be making individual choices, again from Lynne Edwards' Essential Sampler Book - hence my trialing the Dresden Plate Block which some people have said they want to do.

Meantime, at Bredon Crafters, we were doing some embroidery - both free-form and also Bullion Roses.  This was satisfying and prompted me to make a page ready to start another Fabric Art Journal containing embroidery samples.  Also I quickly sewed up a spiral bound notebook cover as a base for some free form embroidery stitches.

As we continue on with experiments in embroidery I hope to make more pages for another Cloth Book and more book covers as gifts.

 My aspirations to make a large wall hanging called Gertie's Garden, and which will be a reflection (I hope) of the lovely gardens my green fingered mother used to create, are still an ambition.

Actual work on it has had to be held back to do these other things.  But, together with my on-line Stumpwork course, I hope to make progress soon.
 
 
 But returning to Fabric Art Journals, or Cloth Books, here are some images from the ones already completed and I hope to do more on this as some additional embroidery samples take shape and can be turned into pages.
 The ones shown here contain all kinds of bits that might have been lying in drawers or boxes and have been sewn or fused on to the fabric pages.

There are stitch samples to see what the built-in stitches on my sewing machine look like.

There are labels I have tried out: some printed on to fabric, others machine embroidered and some that are written with a fabric pen.

 Other bits on the fabric pages are Suffolk Puff examples, silk roses and test stitching on tea or coffee dyed calico after the sewing machine has been serviced.

If it looks pretty, or can illustrate something, then put it into a Fabric Art Journal for future reference.

Another Block for the Sampler Quilt

The number of blocks is slowly growing and with luck and some hard fast work some quilts will be ready for our exhibition in October. This one is called Card Trick.

Bredon Crafters & Quilters have set a date for their exhibition - it will be held on 31st October 2015 at Bredon Village Hall and doors will be open from 10.00 am until 4.00 pm.

For anyone reading this who doesn't know where Bredon is - it is a largish village in Gloucestershire, England.  We are situated on the lower slopes of Bredon Hill, which is at one end of the Cotswold escarpment.  Our village stands quite high above the River Avon in beautiful countryside.  We are fortunate that we are high enough not to experience the floods which have often ravaged Tewkesbury, the town nearest to us and famous for its floods.


Let's hope that by October we will have been creative enough to offer goods for sale, encourage admiration of our work and have a great time with talking to visitors about what we do.

We recently invited a local textile artist - Angie Hughes to lead a workshop for us and the result was everyone went home with a fabric bowl like the one shown here.


So another quilt block completed and all this traditional stuff is good for us and will lay the foundations for more artistic work later on.

After all we call our group Quilting Arts and already we have made inroads into artwork by painting and printing on fabric and currently we are adding pages to our Fabric Art Journals.


Journal Quilts was something else we have tried and will do more of later on.

The two shown here are made in a different way.  To the left is a fused landscape.  It's fabrics are bonded to a background and then print blocks with machine embroidery add the finishing touches.

The one below is painted on calico and embellished with Kantha quilting, applique and hand embroidery

Although we try our hands at lots of techniques perhaps the nicest thing about our groups is the social side of things.

We love to chat and enjoy getting together to work on similar challenges, encouraging each other as we go.

We always have so much we want to do and there is never enough time.

Another day I'll post some images and tell the tale about the crazy houses quilts and wall hangings that we made

Finally this last image is of my hand-made needlework box which I made as one of my assessment pieces for my city & Guilds Level 3 Patchwork & Quilting Certificate.

I love it and do not intend using it - I won't be sticking pins in it.  It's is simply to admire and value as something I'll probably never do again.

Free-Form Embroidery

This kind of embroidery is really enjoyable.  I have had the book by Judith Baker Montano for ages and meant to try this fun way of using simple stitches and finally I've got round to doing it.

This is something I'll be trying out again very soon because there are so many more tempting examples in her book.

I used Anchor Pearl Cotton No. 5 thread, some plain colours and some variegated.  They are a substantial weight and work really well with this sort of embroidery.


In the hoop I've layered plain organza on top of blue quilting cotton and this gives the surface a sheen as well as making it a firm foundation for the embroidery.

I decided my design would be an under-the-sea idea and one thing which would have improved the finished picture would have been to paint a background on to the cotton with some indications of under-the-sea life. There are many examples of this sort of thing in the book too.

The first stitches I used are called Back Stitch Star and very easy to do.  Then the long ones shown below are Back Stitch again threaded through with a silky rayon thread.

 Next I used some variations of Buttonhole Stitch - the circular three seen on the left of the hoop are embroidered in variegated threads.

Then some quarter circles of Buttonhole Stitch growing out from a couched stem.  The stem was made with DMC polyester metallic thread which splits into many really fine metallic strands.

I used one of these fine strands to couch the thread in place - not easy as this type of thread keeps splitting into its individual parts and has a mind of its own - but the shiny finish was worth it in the end.

Now the design is more or less finished and the fun part is that it has all been done with some well-known and familiar stitches but in an unusual way.  French Knots, Buttonhole Stitch, Couching, Backstitch, Fly Stitch and Pistil Stitch (which is a variation of French Knots).

What a delightful way to embroider something unusual without any stress.

My plan is to put this embroidered square back to back with the Rose Bullion Stitch square described here a couple of days ago, and to make a page for a Cloth Book.  This will be how I store and present my sample embroidery designs.

Of course there are many other ways that these try-outs could be used too but that is for another day.

Roses Hand Embroidery

For the moment my Gertie's Garden wall hanging is on hold awaiting the quilting stage but in the meantime I have been doing some hand embroidery in readiness for our Bredon Crafters' session.this month.

The plan is to try out different techniques over the next few months and these can be incorporated into all sorts of things.  Examples are: a cloth book, a notebook cover, a journal quilt and so on.

My own preference will be for 3D, raised or free-form embroidery, as well as a mixture of interesting applique techniques including dimensional applique. This suggests another range of uses including bags, wall art and domestic items such as a table runner. However the wishes and interests of my colleagues at Crafters and Quilters will influence where we go with this.

But as we work through the techniques I plan to include some of them in my Gertie's Garden wall hanging as well.

Today I chose to revise the Bullion Stitch and the Bullion Rose.  This technique doesn't need a hoop as the stitches are 'scooped'  i.e. not stabbed as they are when in a hoop.  So cotton fabric and stranded cotton embroidery threads were needed as well as a needle suitable for bullion stitches.  The best choice of needle is a Milliner's or Straw Needle as they are long and slender and have a slender eye which makes it easier to pull the thread through the wraps.

As I went on I did find that some fusible very light-weight interfacing was helpful too because the bullion rose is quite dense and can pull the cotton fabric unless it is interfaced.  The interfacing also helped to 'end-off'' the thread at the back as it provided a double thickness to tuck in the thread ends.

Here you see two bullion stitches starting to form the centre of the rose.  The long Milliner's Needle is shown too.  Bullion Stitch is created by scooping a short section of the fabric and wrapping the thread around the needle a number of times, then pulling the needle through the wraps and fastening them down by taking the needle through to the back of the work.
The rose is formed by making stitches is different colours which encircle the ones made earlier.

In this image you can see the wraps made around the needle.  Next the wraps are held with the left thumb as the needle is pulled through and then laid back on to the fabric to form the 'grub' shape.

In the next image some small leaves are shown which are simply Detached Chain Stitch.







 Bullion Stitch is so versatile.  I have a book, which illustrates many designs, called the A to Z of Embroidered Motifs - amazing what you can do with a simple embroidery stitch.  The book is published by search Press.

The Rosebud shown next to the two roses had a Fly Stitch calyx and a Stem Stitch stem - both very simple stitches

To add interest and to practice some more I went on to try an Aster flower with lots of long Bullion Stitches and which included a centre of French Knots - more good practice.

The Aster has a Stem Stitch stem (very appropriate) and a detached chain stitch leaf.

Finally, to bring it all together into a little scene I added some Fern Stitch grasses and some French Knots.

This will be made up into a page for a Fabric Art Journal (or Cloth Book) but it will need another page to back it and I haven't decided what to put on that page yet.  It might be some more different embroidery or it could be some applique experiments.  Looking forward to finding out!

Layering Wall Art

Moving on with the preparation of my Gertie's Garden wall hanging I've been layering various materials to create the base for my planned applique and hand embroidery.

As mentioned in an earlier post I decided to paint the outline colours on cream calico using Neocolor II crayons and then painting over the crayon with water to give a painterly finish.  The colours turn much brighter once the water is applied.

As also mentioned I delineated the shapes of the design using diluted textile medium to avoid colour bleed between the different parts of the background.  This worked very well.

I wanted to move away from using a purely quilted background, although I'll need to add some quilting to get the firm base that I need and I'll move on to that next.  For the moment though I've concentrated on applying layers to the painted background.

First I have applied sheer crystal organza in a silver colour over the painted blue sky.  I pinned it in place and left an overlap so that if there is any shrinkage when I quilt over it there will be sufficient fabric overlay.  It can be trimmed after stitching.

Next I tore long strips of green organza in two shades and applied over the area which will be the grass.  This again was pinned and then tacked down with white thread.  Quite a lot of tacking necessary to keep the strips where I wanted them.

I wanted to include a pond in my garden so I've used some Angelina hot fix fibres underneath a blue organza.

Garden ponds aren't really blue of course and at the moment it looks like a miniature swimming pool but I hope that as I add surroundings with stitching the idea of water reflecting the blue sky will become more realistic (fingers crossed!).

Around the pond area I've used a cotton with a crackle design which I hope looks like paving and I bonded the shape with fusible web.  I must admit my earlier efforts to create a paper pattern for the different shapes has paid off here.

Again I used fusible web and a cotton with a wall design for the rockery, even though I had painted in a rockery to begin with.  I think it will look quite realistic when it has hand embroidered plants growing between the stones.

I decided not to put any layering over the gravel area in the middle and consequently it's going to need quite a lot of quilting to get the texture needed.

The front of the design is still work in progress.  I want it full of flowers as my mother would have done and she loved spring flowers like crocus, violets, primroses and so on.  So first of all I painted the background in a variety of greens for foliage but it didn't seem quite right.  Then I spent lots of time searching for the right layers to break it up ready for hand stitched flowers.

At this point it has two-tone silk strips in a cerise and orange with a purple pink organza between.  Currently these are only tacked in place so could be replaced before moving on.

 I need to dwell on this and leave it pinned up on my board to think about before quilting over it.  I'm not sure this background and these colours will work well with what I've been  imagining in my mind, so it's time to step back and consider the options.

In the meantime: here's an image of a layered wall hanging I did some time ago.  I started with a photograph of some autumn leaves which had swirled around my front door.  I printed the image on to A3 sized fabric and applied it to a silk background.  Next I embroidered designs and free machine embroidered around the leaves.  I made some free standing 3D leaves and added these as the top layer after making up the silk into a wall hanging.

But back to Gertie's Garden:  next comes the quilting stage.

I can see that currently it looks more like a seaside scene because it's so barren but I hope that will change as other embellishments play their part and more layers are added.

But first to re-think the foreground and how best to improve the base ready for all those hand stitched flowers.

Preparing a Base for Hand Embroidery

Been busy planning a background for the wall art I want to create and which I am calling Gertie's Garden. I made one false start which delayed me as I thought the base should be a patchwork from materials appropriate to the different parts of the garden.  So I cur it out from my pattern and sewed the curved seams together, but when I pinned it up on my wall board I could see the colours were far too strident for what I had in mind.

After a couple of days dwelling on the problem I decided I would paint the background using my Neocolor II soluble crayons in order to achieve a more subtle starting point for my hand embroidered and appliqued garden.

The first stage had already been completed - a pencil sketch of what I wanted the wall hanging to look like.  I had decided on the size as well.  I already knew that a size ratio of 8 to 13 was accepted by many people as being the optimum shape for a rectangular wall hanging whether in portrait or landscape finish.  This means that if you multiply the smaller measurement by 1.625 you get the larger measurement.  As I want my wall hanging to fill a particular space which is quite large I settled on the size of 24" by 39".

Next I coloured in my sketch and then I scanned it into the computer and enlarged it on to A3 sized paper.

In order to get my layout and proportions correct I printed off my A3 image and folded it into the middle and then marked the fold lines with a pencil. These became the sections of my design which I was able to enlarge onto a penciled grid on a larger sheet of paper measuring a little more than the 39" by 24" that I wanted as my finished size.  I used a large piece of artists paper stiff enough to put up with all the drawing and cutting and using as a pattern.

After drawing out the design in this enlarged format I rubbed out the grid leaving just the broad outlines of my garden design showing sky, lawn, gravel, flower border and pond area.  I marked in some of the main characteristics of the design such as trees, plant pots, rockery and pond.  Now I had a paper pattern which I cut out on the main outlines and put to one side.

I selected a piece of nice calico a little larger than my planned finished size and also a piece of wadding to back it.  My calico had been washed and ironed and was bubbling a bit in the middle so I measured a couple of pieces of freezer paper from my roll and ironed the waxy side to the back of the calico.  This to help reduce the bubbling in the middle of the fabric and to give more stability while I am working up the colours of the design with my crayons.

I had some spare bits of calico and wanted to select colours for the basic parts of the background.  Using water sometimes and fabric medium at other times I tried out the soluble crayons and once satisfied I had found the right colour put the crayon to one side.

I searched the internet for more information about fabric (or textile) medium.  It seems that some fabric artists use it with acrylic paints to make the paint suitable for fabric.  Others use it in a proportion of one to one with paint to avoid colour bleed when using with soluble pencils or crayons.  This is the reason I wanted to use it so that where there was a distinct change of colour between two parts of the garden the colours would not mingle e.g. between sky and grass.

So the next stage was to mark out the main outlines of the design in crayon of appropriate colour.  Then I painted along these lines with diluted textile medium ready for the next stage of colouring in.

My fabric background is prepared with a backing of freezer paper, with the design outlined and with the parts of the design separated with a resist of textile medium.

I have ideas forming now for what I want after the background is coloured and have hopes of doing some layering with sheer fabrics, embellishing with appliques and creating the garden over a period of time with hand embroidered and appliqued flowers, trees, pond and more.

The final image shows some dyed tulle, some torn strips of green organza and some pieces of quilting fabric.  this article will continue once I have coloured the back ground and started to embellish the design.