Gifts

I'm in a Yahoo group that trades fiber art and received this wonderful ATC from Jill. The theme this month was Art Nouveau, and her flower is hand stitched beautifully. I love Fuchsias. The collage card it was in is special too.

Sumptuous Surfaces

I'm taking Sharonb's class http://sharonb.wordpress.com/ from www. Joggles.com and have been working on Lesson l. We are to design and do some exercises to get ready to stitch next week. I decided to work with a Dover Stencil of a shell and use parts of it, repeating it, rotating it. flipping it. It was fun and looks like the start of a series. These are just a few of the many I ended up with.

The first two are one's Sharon said would be best for stitching. The last is my mind map-playing around with what the shells meant to me.

Embellisher Class

Last night I attended an embellisher-felting machine-trunk show and class given by a friend that I hadn't seen for a long, long time. The best part of the class was seeing her-neither of us has aged of course. We are both still deep into creating, and her trunk show was wonderful. The purses were yummy; the wall hanging nice. She was wearing a jacket with Machine embroidered butterflies with Angelina behind the lacy parts-very nice.
The photos are of my class samples to see what different fibers do when needle punched. In the first one the white is silk organza; the Angelina adds the sparkle. In the second I particularly like the red shapes that remind me of flowers. I want to develop this idea. It reminds me of Art Nouveau. In the last one, I liked the way the yarn looked. A nice way to spend the evening.

Altered Book

My altered book had sat around finished except for the cover for way too long. http://intotheblystic.blogspot.com/ has so many wonderful journals with great covers, so she inspired me to finish mine.

First I painted the covers with acrylic, then applied torn pieces of painted tissue. When that was dry, the spine didn't look right, so I covered it with a strip of leather. Using a stencil and molding paste, I made the flowers. When the paste dried, I put green paint on the flowers and rubbed a little bit of gold Treasure Gold on the raised areas.

TIF Challenge

My challenge for the Take it Further group is done. This is a group started by Sharonb http://sharonb.wordpress.com/ I had designed the block with Electric Quilt 6 based on the number 4. To use a 5th color, I added a line. Each section is composed of 4 blocks, and there are 4 sections. It was a fun challenge, and I look forward to February's.

Bead Journal Project

I took a doodling class from Susan Sorrell through http://www.joggles.com/ which was very good. One of the exercises was to make a collage from magazine pictures, then find a section to stitch. The negative areas were to be filled in. I used a gardening catalog.

I like the design, so I isolated one of the flowers for the January postcard I made for the Bead Journal Project http://beadjournalproject.blogspot.com/ Here is the result. The beads don't conform to the curves as well as a back stitch does.

Swaps

Unlimited Textiles, a Yahoo group, exchanges small 5" quilts each month, and this month also 1 or 2 ATC's. The theme was Art Nouveau. Mine was done with fusible and foil that Purple Missus http://purplemissus.blogspot.com/ sent me. The design was from a Dover book. It was traced onto the fusible, cut out, and ironed on the hand dyed fabric. Then the foil was ironed on.

Lace

The other day I decided to use up some old rayon thread, so I started with a layer of heavy water soluble stabilizer then puddled the thread on it. The thread was variegated. After there was a nice layer, I put a thin water soluble stabilizer on top and machined it thoroughly. The heavy stablizer meant not having to use a hoop. The final stitching was done lightly with a metallic, so when the light hits it, there is a slight sparkle. Being rayon, it drapes nicely. I think I will use it for appliques.

Gifts

I'm a member of the Calendar Girls http://calendargirls2008.blogspot.com/ and received my first postcard from Sharon Y. Isn't it great?

On the Fibre and Stitch Yahoo group there was a challenge to create a screen from one of the articles. Everyone's name was put in for a drawing. I was picked and received this book which looks like a lot of inspiration for experimenting. The magazine is great and can be found at www.fibreandstitch.com

Take It Further

Here's my piece ready to be layered and quilted. It is a lot paler than I am used to working, so a challenge. It is for http://sharonb.wordpress.com/

Quilt Blocks

CarolClasperhttp://carolclasper.blogspot.com/ did a series of wonderful New York Beauty blocks, so I thought I would try some and did 4. Here are 2 of them. I think I'll stick to non-traditional piecing. It took so long to be able to work freely-being very left-brained, but I really enjoy it now. I have enough for a small hanging probably for my DIL who likes traditional quilts.

Quilts

I decided to use up some of the stash of batiks and made blocks of 2 strips, 3 strips, and half square triangles. No matter how I arranged them on the design wall, the triangles refused to play with the strips. Oh well, now I have 2 stops using the same fabrics. I tend to make tops which are easier to store than quilts and quilt them when a show comes up.

Take It Further

I've joined the Take it Further Challenge posted by Sharon B http://sharonb.wordpress.com/

She posts 2 options on the challenge. The one for a person we admire would be hard for me-too many to choose-so I am doing the color scheme. This will make me try new ones. I also found that scanning the fabrics and checking the scan against the printed scheme helped me pick the best option.

Now on to designing something.