She's Smiling Now

A quick Franka update. I felt inspired to continue my work on the Franka wall quilt today, and got on quite a bit. It's great to see the smile on her face. I couldn't bear to stop until her face was in place.

If you wonder how I keep track of everything, this is how I do it:

I number every pattern piece after I've drawn it on tracing paper. I have also given each separate fabric a letter, and after I've decided what fabric to use for a certain pattern piece, I write the letter after the number. When I've traced the pattern piece onto paper-backed fusible web, fused it onto fabric and cut it out, I draw a line after the letter. And finally, after I've fused a pattern piece in place on the quilt, I tick it off on the list. I feel slightly silly to share this list with you, as there's something slightly control freakish about it, but if you have a closer look, you'll see that there are 87 pieces listed already, and a few more still missing, so I need something to help me keep track of everything. Some of the pieces are so complicated that I don't want to have to cut them out twice if I can help it. (Ask me how I know...)

Have a great week everyone!

From Uruguay with Love

It’s still pretty quiet in Lundaland. We’re having a very busy period at the office, and I’ve felt quite drained for the last couple of weeks. Therefore I haven’t had the energy to be particularly creative. As usual, when my energy levels are low, I’ve regressed into knitting. I find knitting and the handling of soft wool very soothing and meditative when my brains need a time out.

Last weekend my mum came over for a visit, and we went to a crafts fair together. I found some interesting things, but my best catch was a couple of skeins of hand-painted 100% merino wool from Uruguay. I couldn’t believe it that this amazing and exotic yarn had found its way into my hands.

Hand-painted 100 % merino wool from Uruguay (!)

I decided that I was going to make the yarn into a shawl or scarf, and back home I started searching the Internet for inspiration. I soon found a fun scarf pattern in the pattern library of the Drops Design site. I was amazed at the amount of free patterns that they so generously offer on their site. Do head over there and have a look. There are 14 different languages to choose from, so it’s very user-friendly! I salute that web site. Excellent stuff.

The scarf pattern I chose is this one. It’s nothing like your average knitted scarf, and I really like the tapered ends and the fun bobbles along the lower edge. Isn’t the yarn delicious too? I’ve been lusting after it since I first laid eyes on it. But I didn’t let it distract me from my Uruguayan wool, though.

Knitting in progress. Some rows were only worked halfway before turning back, and that created a curved edge (as there were more rows squeezed in on the lower edge than on the upper edge). Pretty clever, eh?

It didn’t take me even a week to finish the scarf, and I enjoyed making the bobbles and the curved shape, as it provided enough variation to keep it all interesting. Below is an image of the finished scarf. There was some wool left over, so I’ve started on a pair of matching wrist warmers too. This set will keep me snug and warm when winter comes.

Fire Festival and Fun with Franka

It’s been quiet in Lundaland for a couple of weeks. Creatively speaking, that is. I’ve had a lot going on both at work and at home. And I’ve been to Ostrobothnia to visit my folks. I chose last weekend, because that was the time of the Venetian festival that is celebrated in my home area by the end of August every year as a farewell to summer.

Fire and fireworks

Today, however, I’ve been back with a vengeance, and took a great leap forward with the Franka quilt. I’m very happy to reveal that I’ve cut and fused the background (water) to the black base fabric today. That’s one of the scariest stages finished. I’ll walk you through my day with some photographs.

I started by cutting out the upper right hand corner. I was quite relieved to discover that this corner formed a separate piece, as it reduced the size of the main piece, and gave me a chance to practise a bit before I had to tackle the main piece.

I knew that cutting out the pieces, as well as positioning them, was going to be tricky. To help me with the positioning, I used the master paper pattern for the background, a touch screen pen and a pair of tweezers. I laid down the pattern on the black fabric, pressed the touch screen pen to the pattern at certain points to make temporary marks on the fabric, lifted a corner of the pattern, positioned the background fabric piece on the base fabric, aligning it with the markings that I’d made, repositioned the pattern and used my fingers and the tweezers to make sure that everything was properly lined up before I ironed everything down.

To cut out the pieces, I used a combination of scissors and a craft knife. Note the old baby sheet that is placed under the fabric. It’s there for a reason. After I’d cut out the first background piece, I felt a bit sweaty about the next piece, and I must admit that, for a few seconds, I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. Then a solution came to me. If I placed the piece to be cut on another piece of fabric, I would be able to turn the whole piece around easily while cutting, without having to let anything dangle freely with the risk of things getting tangled up and tearing. I only needed to lift the area where I was working, and the rest could rest undisturbed on the sheet while I was turning the fabric around. It worked like a charm. (And probably saved my sanity.)

As for cutting technique, it’s a good idea to start with the small interior areas, and save the big areas for last.

The main background piece is completely cut out. The next step is to position it on the base fabric.

Speaking of sanity, you have to be a bit mad to wanna do this. :D

The background is fused to the base fabric. This silhouette is so cool that I’m tempted to leave it like this. But, no, I’ll save the silhouette idea for another quilt. I’m really excited about this quilt right now, and I’m annoyed that I have to go to work tomorrow. My day job is severely trespassing on my quilting time. :P

 

PS. Those of you who are waiting for the instructions for the needle-felted hearts that I promised to provide: I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, but I haven’t forgotten. I will post them soon.

I felt like needle-felting

This summer I’ve spent a lot of time decluttering my home and getting rid of stuff that I’ve collected over the years. Yesterday I found yet another place where I’d hidden away a bunch of papers that needed to be sorted out. I’m more and more convinced that I was a squirrel in an earlier life.

While sorting out the cupboard where I mainly keep my craft supplies, I found a small box with bits of wool that were the leftovers from a rather ambitious slipover project that I knitted some years ago. The yarn was so beautiful that I hadn’t had the heart to throw it away. In the same box I also found snippets of machine embroidery thread that I had saved ‘for something’. While pondering whether to throw away or save these treasures, I decided on a third option: to make them into something right away.

A number of years ago I experimented a bit with combining yarn and machine embroidery. My first experiment was inspired by a Swedish textile artist, AnnLis Krüger, who uses yarn in her humorous art quilts. Her technique was to wind a bit of yarn around her fingers, place it on a piece of fabric and free-motion stitch it in place. I tried this method, thought it was fun, but a bit tricky, as you had to watch your fingers carefully and be on the alert for loops that got caught around the embroidery foot. Here’s little quilt I made with this technique:

My next experiment was to loosely knit a piece of  fabric, place it between two sheets of water-soluble stabiliser and free-motion stitch the surface to flatten the fabric and lock the knitted stitches in place. That was a lot safer for the fingers and there was no risk of the foot getting stuck on loops. This is what the knitted and stitched fabric looks like:

The embellishers/needle-felting machines that are on the market now open up the possibilities for combining yarn and fabric further. When I did my earlier experiments, I’d hardly even heard of needle-felting, let alone of any needle-felting machines for domestic use. I don’t think that I will invest in an embellisher, but I have bought a handy little tool that is a kind of hand-driven mini needle-felting machine:

So when I found that leftover yarn, I decided it was time to put the needle-felting gadget to the test. I used a piece of craft felt as the base, put a generous amount of fibres (yarn and machine embroidery thread) on top and started punching away. It took me a quite a while to punch the fibres in place (a machine would definitely be a lot quicker), but as long as the project is small and you are equipped with a bit of patience it’s doable. When the fibres were relatively well attached, I took the fabric over to the sewing machine and free-motioned on top to secure everything in place.

I then took my needle-felted fabric pieces and made them into these cute little hearts:

I’d be happy to post instructions on how to make these hearts if anyone is interested. Just leave a comment or e-mail me, and I’ll include the instructions in a future blog post.

White Sand for Franka

It's time for another Franka update.

Since I last wrote about Franka, I've been out hunting for fabric. I needed skin tones, a background fabric (i.e. for the water) and a better green than the one I had at home. It took me two trips to the fabric shop before I had a working combination. Not surprisingly, it was the water that caused me some trouble.

My first idea was to use a very light blue, preferably marbled, fabric for the water. I didn't find a suitable blue that was as light as what I had intended, but I found a slightly darker one that went very well with the other colours, which, after all, are pretty saturated. 

At home, though, I had second thoughts. The blue fabric is beautiful, but there is a problem: I'm a red person. The colours in the room where Franka will hang are dark red, burgundy, warm yellow, warm dark brown and white. Blue would look very out of place there. I did think of this before I went to the shop, but I sort of thought I'd get away with it... Lesson learned.

So it was time to put on the old Thinking Cap. And this is what I thought.

First I thought that I could make the wall hanging even more pop art-inspired, and use black and white for everything except Franka and the flowers. That would make them pop. I decided to try out the colour schemes with the help of a photo-editing software.

The original plan

The pop art plan

Then, suddenly, I realised that I had made a very silly mistake, assuming that water is blue. Water is, as we all know, colourless and takes its colour from the things it reflects or the things that show through it. It looks blue or grey when it reflects the sky. But when you stand in a foot of water on a Thai beach, looking down at your feet, the water is clear and what you see is cream coloured sand around your toes.

The way I imagine Franka is that she's floating in about a foot of water with sand made out of coral and sea shells under her. So I realised that a cream coloured background would make sense. It fits in with the scene, and also with my room.

The third colour scheme

So off I went to the fabric shop again, and I found the perfect fabric for what I have in mind. Today I drew the background on paper-backed fusible web and ironed it onto the fabric. Now I've reached one of the most critical stages in the whole project: cutting out the background fabric in reverse appliqué, and fusing it onto a black base fabric.

The fusible web is in place and I'm getting ready for some precision cutting...

Wish me luck!

Further Adventures of the Shibori Shrimp

I'm not one to give up easily, so of course I couldn't stay away from the shrimp, even though I said there would be no more shrimps until I'd renewed my dyes. (For the earlier instalments of The Adventures of the Shibori Shrimp, look here and here.)

I had one - no, as a matter of fact, two - of those famous 'What If'-moments. What if I used fabric paint instead of dye? That could be interesting. And what if I, instead of measuring my string and making lots of tedious knots, threaded the needle with uncut thread, stitched from one side to the other, then made a U-turn and stitched back before cutting the thread. Then I would only have to tie one knot with the two loose ends, instead of four separate knots. 

Pretty clever, eh? 

(I'm pretty sure, too, that I'm not the first one who's thought of this.)

Shrimp No 3

Shrimp painted with metallic fabric paint 

The result

The fabric is actually starting to look quite interesting now. Perhaps I could have added a little more paint, but I quite like it as it is. It was a successful experiment. By the way, I did remove the thread while the paint was still wet, as I wasn't sure what would happen if it dried in a crumpled state. That's for future experimentation to find out.

From the shibori shrimp to another food-related topic: I had a very nice surprise earlier in the week when 'journalist, traveler, art and music lover' Joan Walters contacted me on Flickr to tell me she'd used the 'Can't Resist Thai Food' page that I made for The Sketchbook Challenge in May on a blog entry. Please use this link to have a look at my page and the other gorgeous food-related sketchbook pages that she used on the blog. Make sure to check out more entries too while you're there, as there is a lot of great artwork to be found!

Shibori Shrimp

Do you remember the little shibori shrimp that I prepared earlier? If not, please refer back to this post if you’d like to refresh your memory.

I had hoped to show you some really neat shibori-dyed fabric by now, but to be honest, things have not exactly worked out the way I planned.

It started well enough with the little shrimp, but when I applied dye to it, things started going wrong. I soaked the shrimp in soda ash solution (=fixative) according to the instructions, and started painting it with dye. As soon as I put brush to shrimp, though, I suspected that the result might not be what I had intended, because the fabric just soaked up the dye like a sponge.

Shrimp soup

I suspected that there would be very few white areas left after batching.

I was right

I’d mixed too much dye, so I used the leftovers for marbling another piece of fabric. I used the old ice cream tub method.

Marbled fabric

To return to the shrimp, I figured that the problem was a combination of moist fabric, thin dye solution, soft fabric and not tightening the strings enough. So I decided have another try with the same piece and a darker colour.

Shrimp number two

This time I didn’t soda soak the shrimp, but used thickened dye with soda ash added to the print paste instead. I figured that the dry cloth in combination with thick dye would stop the pigments from migrating too far into the fabric.

Shrimp stew

I was right, but…

 

This time something went wrong in the dyeing process. This is supposed to be overdyed with dark blue, so as you can see, the colour is very weak compared to the purple. The question is now: did I use too little soda ash, or are my dyes getting old? Perhaps both. It is a couple of years since I bought them, and I’ve read somewhere that they have a shelf life of approximately two years, so I think it’s probably time to use them and get new ones.

Again, I managed to mix more dye than I needed, so I did some monoprinting with the leftovers on fabrics that I’d dyed and discharged earlier, but wasn't happy with.

This one became my favourite.

There’ll be no more shrimps now until I’ve renewed my dyes. But rest assured, I’ve not given up. I will try it again, and succeed.