Category Archives: picture

Busy Week

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It’s been another busy week but unfortunately not in a creative way, my day job has been going more than a bit crazy. It’s been as much as I can do to make myself eat something before crashing into bed each evening. This weekend I have really thrown myself into textiles to make up for an otherwise rubbish week. It has been a very productive weekend though…

Mr TB was out on a stag night on Saturday so I put the evening to good use, watching trashy TV while applying wax to an apron I rainbow dyed with blues and greens that morning:

This is the batik pattern I have been doodling, it’s taking a surprisingly long time, 4 hours so far and I’m only half way finished…

I plan to over-dye this with a deep purple and then spray with plasti-dip spray to waterproof it so I have a felting / dyeing apron (no more soggy felter’s middle for me!).

I have finished a couple of C&G “samples” that I started last weekend, the assignment is to explore natural wools with a view to creating a wall hanging but to my mind these pieces are too large (approx 40 x 60 cm / 16 x 24″) to be samples and I like them as wall hangings in their own right:

Do you remember this piece of ice-dyed felt from a few weeks ago?

I turned it into a bag, this is the front flap: 

Inside the front flap:

I plan to do a lot of hand embroidery on this piece, mostly blanket stitch around the edges and bit of embellishment on the front flap. If I can get it finished in time I will submit it to the Yarns in the Cathedral exhibition in May.

And finally, some blue tits have been showing a lot of interest in the bird pod I hung a couple of weeks ago. I can’t decide if they are nesting in it or just stealing the cat fluff I put in it as welcome present…

Linking up to nina-marie, off the wall Friday

Mosaic Quilting Part 2

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Well, this has proved much more challenging than I had imagined. Laying the pieces out and ironing them into place was fiddly but enjoyable, I like the creativity of laying out the little pieces, thinking about how the light would play on this scene.

Cutting the batting and backing fabric and attaching it to the interfacing, all very easy and straight forward. In large part the ease of this step was due to 505 basting spray, if you have not tried this yet you are missing out. It is brilliant! It allows you to re-position your pieces for about 15 min after spraying them and then keeps the fabric glued together for 2-4 months or until you wash them. Amazing stuff!

The misery did not start until I tried add some machine stitching. Then either the little pieces of fabric that I had so carefully placed either fell off or folded over to get stitched in half. What a mess! :o( To cap it all off, while intently trying to flatten each piece of fabric as the machine foot went over them I failed to notice the centre of the piece was starting to balloon and warp away from the batting.

What would I do differently next time?

  • I would use wonderweb for the backing not interfacing (I think wonderweb will be more “sticky”)
  • Although Terri Stegmiller does not recommend it I would be tempted to iron the wonderweb onto the fabric pieces before cutting them into fragments, although this will need more wonderweb than Terri’s method, I think it will hold the edges of the fragments down better making them less likely to fold over or detach.
  • Stitch from the centre of the quilt outwards. I did plan to do that on this quilt but got carried away stitching the wavy lines for the sea : embarrassed : 

This is what it currently looks like…

All is not lost, I will persevere and hope to resurrect this piece into something beautiful.

P.S. I have had a really fun idea for a small felted Xmas gift that makes me chuckle whenever I think of it, I will make a prototype this weekend and share the results with you next week.

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