In need of renovation.

This month at Textile Challenges I am sending my house front to Pam.
Her theme is "In Need of Renovation".

Of course I just had to do a thatched cottage seeing as Devon has lots of them
Most of them are in much better condition that this one I have to add.

I started with painted Lutradur over stone coloured cotton. The window and doors are made using scrapbook papers and roughly stitched to the house front.

The thatch is made from fancy fibres placed a stitched on in a haphazard way. I used a fabric marker to make the black "holes".
Machine stitching was next and the whole piece was rubbed with various brown ink pads.

Great fun, I hope Pam will like it.

Moon Goddess

My very last arch of the year long swap at Textile Challenges is for Carol Rowland.
Carol likes fantasy figures so a Moon Goddess came to my mind.

The background is calico painted and stamped with acrylic paints. The detail on the side is drawn with pen and ink.
The goddess herself is one of my drawings that I scanned into the computer and printed out on to cotton.

I get the printable cotton from Crafty Computer Paper. You print the image, cut it out, peel off the backing and iron in place.

I wanted it to look like she is gathering energy from the moon so I used metallic thread to sew the energy lines and added seed beads for sparkles.
The edge is satin stitched with metallic thread.

Circus

At Alter-Native UK in March the Skinny Book Page theme was Circus.

I wanted to use some fabric that I had used before for a Circus theme.
It is bright and fun, but I didn't have quite enough for the 5" x 3" pages.

I printed some vintage circus pictures on to iron on cotton and fused them to the fabric and ran round the edge with a zig zag stitch.

As the pages are going to make a book of collages I decided to stitch my fabrics to some watercolour paper that I painted in bright colours.
This makes the pages sturdy and will fit in the books better I hope.

I always love the trapeze and would love to fly like that but how can I get over my fear of heights and climb the ladder!!
I'll probably just stay on the ground and marvel instead ;0)

Art Nouveau

The theme for January's swap at Unlimited Textiles was Art Nouveau.
Well new year, new art.

I love this style. It flows and grows with spirals and curves and is just beautiful.
With my love of flowers it was certain what I would choose as my focus.

I had some lovely pieces of green silk that were too small to do much with but made great backgrounds for my flowers.
The flowers are organza. I cut out the shapes with a small point on my soldering iron.
I like to do this as the edges don't fray but I have to remember to wear a mask as the fumes are unpleasant.

I did a little detail with gold thread which quilted the items too.

The ATC's are zig zagged onto pelmet vilene and the quiltie (5" x 5") is backed with hand painted cotton.

The Flower

The main inspiration for this piece was the gorgeous clematis in my garden.
Its lush purple flowers are fading now and are paper thin. It is not hard to imagine that you can see my lovely Cob wall showing through the petals.

The fabrics are all painted, dyed and stamped by me - such fun ;0) - and pieced together in a crazy manner on batting, with the flower machined over it all.
Little buttons symbolize the falling blossoms.
I mounted the crazy quilt to some gorgeous navy velvet and made a machine wrapped cord from sari silk to hang it by.
The crazy quilt measures 7.5ins x 9ins the whole quilt measures 10.5ins x 11.5ins and its hanging length is
22.5ins

Do you remember the exercise Sue Bleiweiss set and I created the crazy backgrounds?
Well I tried to do a similar thing here. Not quite the same I know, I gathered the right colours together this time but I did just put the pieces on to let them have a life of their own and I left the edges raw with no or very little tidying.

I think the quilt does have a life and the edges seen to echo the feel of Autumn in its "aged" look.
Roger thought it had a Cubist look to it hence it became the "Picasso Garden"








You can find this piece for sale at my Etsy shop.