Prof Puppet review

This you tube clip is a funny book review of  Kyra Hicks book Martha Ann's Quilt for Queen Victoria.

The book is great and comes highly recommended by my daughter Selena age 12. She has written a review of it in her reading diary for school. Thought I would share it.

Prof Puppet review -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr55889FMCc

 

Dyeing, Discharge, Paint and Quilting

For the past few days I have been working on another quilt. This quilt started because I had some wonderful dyed fabric which I liked, the pieces were a bit too small for anything

 so I stitched them together, they were longer than wide and this resulted in wider fabric with a seam down the middle. This central seam looked a bit odd so my plan was to do more piecing. Instead I found a sketch which I had done previously and  made a stencil of it. I placed it centrally onto the fabric and removed some of the colour with a decolourant. The effect worked, I liked it and thought that I could make it into a quilt if only the seam down the middle was not there. I kept working on it painting circles and organic shapes in the background around the figures to develop and enhance the design. I liked the warm subtle colours which were a result of the dyeing and discharging  process and chose paints which complimented them.

 At this point I thought that maybe with some quilting the middle seam would disappear and not be obvious.  I finished the quilting this morning. I think that I will do a bit more on it possibly more painting.

Drawing is essential

I enjoy drawing faces in particular the old wrinkled ones, here is one I have been working on recently of an Aunt of mine, she is now in her eighties and I took the photo when I went back to Barbados for my mother's funeral back in April . I cropped the photograph of her omitting her mouth and her wispy grey hair. There is always room for improvement when drawing.

New Year

January is quickly coming to an end and for the last few weeks I have been having problems uploading photos from my camera for my blog entry. I tried to sort out the problem myself but in the end had to ask Dave.  Of course the entry which I had started is no longer appropriate but I am glad that Christmas is over. I hope 2013 is better than 2012 was.

Next week if I get enough students enrolling I will be teaching a five week introduction to Batik class at Swavesy Village College. The classes are aimed at adults who have not done Batik before. We will work on Paper and fabric to create original designs. It should be fun.

I had shown the initial design for this wholecloth painted quilt a few blogs ago and would like to share the final results. I had wanted to retain the painterly quality of the design showing the sweeping movement of the brushstrokes in the background.

The initial painting on fabric.

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Machine embroidery onto painted background, stitching added

Stitching complete and binding put on.