May I present: Franka!

It's so satisfying to occasionally finish something from the UFO-pile. Those UnFinished Objects that for some reason always get pushed down to the bottom of the To Do-list by other projects or chores that seem more urgent. A quilt with the comic album heroine Franka has been one of those projects. I started it in 2011 and worked on it off and on for a while, but for some reason it ended up in the UFO-department. Just over a month ago I found it and decided to finish it this time.

If you want to have a look at the earlier blog posts about Franka, you can either click on the label Franka in the list to the right, or, if you prefer to see the entries one by one in chronological order from the first to the last, you can follow these links:

The story behind the Franka quilt
http://www.salundannika.blogspot.fi/2011/05/normal-0-false-false-false_29.html
http://www.salundannika.blogspot.fi/2011/06/normal-0-false-false-false_12.html
http://www.salundannika.blogspot.fi/2011/06/normal-0-false-false-false_22.html
http://www.salundannika.blogspot.fi/2011/07/things-are-cooking-in-my-kitchen.html
http://www.salundannika.blogspot.fi/2011/08/white-sand-for-franka.html
http://www.salundannika.blogspot.fi/2011/09/fire-festival-and-fun-with-franka.html
http://www.salundannika.blogspot.fi/2011/09/shes-smiling-now.html
http://www.salundannika.blogspot.fi/2011/10/flora-fauna.html

To be honest, I think this task might have been the one that put me off Franka at the time. I knew it would be a challenge to cut out the letters in the thought bubble, and to keep track of all the little bits that I had to save for the inside of the letters!

Another thing that worried me was the questions of how I should quilt it. Originally I had planned to quilt the background water in some way, but the more I thought about it, the more I hesitated. This is fused appliqué with a black fabric behind a very light fabric, so any mistakes would most likely result in tiny black holes/dots where the needle had penetrated the fabric. I was not willing to take that risk.

The solution was to only pin the quilt within the black outlines, and also to quilt it along the black edges. This means that the quilting doesn't really show from the front, and also that the fused appliqué is not stitched at all, only fused. This was another concern until I reached the conclusion that this is an art quilt, meant to only hang on a wall and perhaps never to be washed. The fusible web is a strong glue and it will hold everything securely in place for this purpose. Having reached this insight I was at peace and felt that I could finally finish my work.

There were a lot of thread ends to knot off as neatly as possible...

because the secret quilting is revealed on the back of the quilt:

I chose a facing as finishing method

And here she is: Franka!

Oh - It's even nicer than I thought... 

And here she is alongside with the original inspiration: a comics album heroine from the 1970's, drawn by Dutch artist Henk Kuijpers.

Thanks for visiting my blog!

Flora & Fauna

It's time for another quick Franka update. By now I've added the flowers and the fish and started working on the thought bubble.

All those tiny spaces inside the letters... They were a total surprise to me. I hadn't noticed them before I drew the outside of the letters. It's probably just as well I didn't. :D

Behind the thought bubble you can catch a glimpse of another project, which turned out to be a little more ambitious than I expected. That's perfectly normal in my world. I still haven't learned that whenever I think "That shouldn't be too hard" or "That shouldn't take too long", an alarm bell should go off. But it's probably just as well it doesn't. :D

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!

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.

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!

Things Are Cooking in My Kitchen

After a rather slow start, I’ve really got into swing with my experimentations now. Some have been successful, others less so. I wrote before that I’d like to try shibori, deconstructed (breakdown) printing and gelatin printing. By now I have tried them all and will report back in due course. Before that I’ll just share a few other projects that are already finished or in progress.

Softsculpt

This is a material that you heat up with e.g. an iron and then press onto/into an object or surface. The material retains the shape when it cools. However, if you’re not happy with the form or texture, you can reheat the Softsculpt to flatten it again, and redo the imprint. I have had this material for three years without trying it, until two days ago, when I finally was inspired. I probably spent an hour searching my flat for things that could be used for stamp-making (e.g. a vegetable brush, a piece of wood, a Christmas ornament, a quilting ruler, a candle-holder…). I haven’t yet tried the stamps, though.

Angie’s Fall

Perhaps you remember that I was very careful when I removed the stencil that I used for the pillow? One evening I was standing with it in my hand, wondering about how to store it, when I got an idea. It would make a great print on a t-shirt. So I picked out a t-shirt that I’d planned to print on and got cracking. I used the fabric paints that I bought in Edinburgh. Very luxurious result: they’re all metallic paints. Yum.

(And: I managed to remove the stencil without ripping it, so I’ll probably be able to use it one more time.)

Franka

I had planned to hunt for fabrics for Franka as soon as my vacation started, but I got busy with other things instead. Yesterday I had a rummage in my stash and came up with some yummy fabrics that I think will work. Here you see her top and skirt. But I still need to go on a hunt for water and skin tones. I’m excited, but slightly apprehensive. Those shapes will be a challenge to handle. Thank goodness for paper-backed fusible web. Without it this wouldn’t be possible.

Shove me in the shallow water before I get too deep...

Now that the worst pressure is off at work, and I finally got my act together and booked that trip to Edinburgh that I should have booked ages ago, I decided to wind down at the outdoor Swimming Stadium today. Gosh, it felt good. Ever since I discovered swim goggles, swimming has been one of my favourite forms of exercise. It’s the nearest a human comes to flying. Too bad, then, that I lost the habit a number of years ago.

I was pleased to discover that my recent snorkelling adventures have strengthened my faith in my own ability to stay afloat. I was more relaxed in the water than I’ve ever been. The snorkelling taught me that you don’t need to continually flap your arms and legs around when you’re swimming. To my surprise, when I was stuck behind slow-moving fellow water-creatures I automatically let my arms relax by my sides just like I learned to do when snorkelling, and just used my legs to push me forward. I never did that before. It sounds ridiculous, but I guess I was afraid that unless I kept my arms stretched out to the front or sides, I’d lose my balance in the water and tip forward. Don’t ask me why, because it’s irrational. But I think it’s connected to the same feeling that I could get when I was snorkelling and reached a steep rock on the sea floor: the feeling that you’re hanging over the edge of a cliff and might fall down. I had a nightmare many years ago, where I was swimming outside a beautiful tropical island and suddenly reached the continental shelf. The steep edge leading down into the dark blue abyss had me waking up in panic with a big NO in my head. I don’t know where the dream came from, as I’d never been in any place like that before. However, by the end of my recent holiday I was pleased to discover that I’d conquered a lot of the fear. A place called Ko Haa was the ultimate proof, as the cliff we snorkelled around had very steep edges, and you could see the divers deep down below you. But with a life vest on and a competent instructor by my side it was no problem at all. I felt confident and safe, and it became my favourite site, as the underwater terrain was varied and exciting, with huge boulders and a lot of interesting things going on. I could have stayed there for hours more. What a shame that good things have to end so quickly.

And speaking of good things, this rather long and rambling tale leads me to my next Franka update. Last Sunday I worked on the water template and discovered that it will be challenging, but it’s perfectly doable. I’m not afraid of a challenge and I have the patience of an angel when I know what I want to accomplish. I’ll do the water in raw edge reverse appliqué. I’m getting ready to go hunting for fabrics as soon as my vacation starts. But before that, I’m going up to Ostrobothnia to my folks to celebrate a traditional Finnish Midsummer Festival.

Summertime, and the Living is Easy

The weather’s been fantastic this week, so I’ve been out and about quite a bit, spying on ducklings, sitting on rocks lapping up the sun, and playing with paint and gesso as a resist (I’ll get back to that later) on the balcony – which I finally managed to scrub clean on Saturday. I need more flowers, though. Something that pops. Something deep red or purple. I’m thinking geraniums or dahlias. My ankle is a lot better now, so my spirits have lifted considerably and I’ve snapped out of the lethargic state I’ve been in for weeks. I’ve even been to the gym. Phew, it feels good to be back.

I haven’t done much textile work, though. It’s been too hot, and who knows when we’ll get a hot spell the next time. Better enjoy it while it lasts. The forecast says it’ll be cooler by tomorrow. But I have done some thinking about Franka. I’ve finished defining all the lines by now and she’s been hanging on the wall in her usual place, where I’ve studied her from time to time. 

Franka in her current state. I’ve moved the left border a bit, and I’ll also move the text down a bit when I make the template for her thought bubble.

My first plan was to use appliqué, like Pam RuBert, but I’ve come to realise that I’ll have to use a combination of appliqué and reversed appliqué. The black ripples on the water would be quite laboursome to cut out and sew in their right places, so I’m thinking that I could cut away the ripples and all the other design elements from the ‘water fabric’, and apply that onto a black foundation. The ripples would then be formed by black gaps in the water fabric, and the rest of the design could be appliquéd in the other black gaps. In theory this seems to be the right way to do it, but I haven’t yet made the water template, so I don’t know yet what difficulties I’ll encounter. I started with the flower and fish templates today. This is what they look like so far:

  

Some of the elements are tiny, so I’ll have to think about that. It may be that I paint them in with the help of a stencil and opaque paint, instead of trying to cut them out in fabric and sew or glue them down.

Franka in Progress

I’ve been quiet about Franka for a while, but now I want to return to her. The printout has been hanging on my wall in exactly the same state as it was in the last time I mentioned it, just over a month ago. I figured that it would be fun to share with you the process of how she develops from a frame in a comic album to a wall quilt. I have an idea about what I need to do to get the result I want, but there are many design issues (known as well as unknown) to solve along the way.

For this project, my greatest influence is a textile artist called Pam RuBert. She makes humorous wall quilts with her alter ego Pamdora in the funniest situations. Her quilts always make me laugh. So I’m going to study her techniques for fused raw edge appliqué to help me resolve some of the issues with my Franka quilt. It will be a learning process. I’ve probably jumped in off the deep end again, but never mind. It makes things more exciting.

Starting from the beginning, what I’ve done so far, is, firstly, to scan the image from the comic album with as high a resolution as my scanner could manage (1200 dpi). I then determined the size of the finished quilt (70 x 74 cm / 27” x 29”) and printed the scanned image in full size and greyscale. The printout was 15 A4 pages, which I joined together with sticky tape.

The next step was to determine the different design elements in the image, and to draw them in with a permanent marker. My aim is to be as true as possible to the original, but in some cases I need to simplify or alter the image to make it work with fabric. I also decided that I wanted more space around her hand on the left side of the image. This meant that I needed to add more lines to the flowers above that hand. At the same time I also made some other alterations that I felt were needed.

I’ve used permanent markers and a white gel pen to define the design elements. I want the lines as sharp as possible, as that will help me when I’m making the templates for the fabric pieces. The process of filling in the lines is a bit tedious, but essential, because it forces me to make decisions that will help me with the templates later. A drawback with markers, though, is the fumes. I’ve kept a window open beside me to make sure the room is well ventilated. It’s also a good idea to have a scrap piece of paper underneath, as the markers easily bleed through the paper and stain your work surface (in this case my kitchen table). The white gel pen is for correcting mistakes that I make while marking, for removing lines in the original that need to be left out, and for creating more contrast in less well-defined areas.

When I’ve finished defining the design elements, I’ll start thinking about templates and fabric. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

Defining the design elements with permanent markers and a white gel pen. 

I moved the border and redrew the flower to the bottom left.

Something Finished, Something New

I love to learn new things and to try different techniques, and my head is spilling over with ideas and future projects, which means that I’m pretty easily distracted, although I prefer to think that I have an inquiring mind. I always have a number of different projects going on all at once, and an even greater number of UFOs that may or may not become finished products. Every now and then, though, I do finish a project, which gives me great satisfaction. Last weekend I finished two projects. Firstly, a hand embroidered piece that was shipped off to an amazing person overseas (I will publish an image later), and secondly, the knitted and crocheted wrist warmers that I started working on in January. Now I’m off to work on an art doll and the Franka wall quilt. – Or so I thought.

This week I’ve continued decluttering my home – a Herculean task – and found a bag of gorgeous yarn that I’ve been saving. So, there I went again, off in another direction, and I started knitting a slipover for myself. Well, my excuse is that it’s all part of the decluttering process. I need to find a good place to store the yarn, and what storage is better than actually finishing and wearing it?

Another thing I unearthed in my decluttering frenzy was an apron pattern by Meg McElwee of Sew Liberated, which I bought a couple of years ago. This project has been on and off my mind since then, while my old apron has slowly deteriorated. I also found the fabrics that I’d put aside for the apron and figured that the best storage for them would be the place where I store my apron. So I started cutting out the pattern pieces.

In conclusion, the situation now is that I finished two projects and started four new. It’s pretty normal for me, I guess. It will take some time to finish them, but I have faith in these projects. I don’t think they’ll end up in the UFO-bin. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

 Finished wrist warmers. Knitted base, crocheted flounces. 

Based on a pattern in Solveig Hisdal’s Dikt i maskor.

 

 Doll in progress. The fabric has been dyed and the pattern pieces are ready for sewing.

 Slipover in progress. Yarn: Freedom Spirit by Twilleys of Stamford

 Apron in progress. Fabric: my granddad’s old table cloth. 

The apron is reversible, so the other side will be something less Christmasy.

 Franka in progress. I started defining the pattern elements on the printout. 

This project will be a challenge, but I like that.

Franka

Today I want to tell you a little story as a prelude to a project I want to start soon. When I was ten, I received a comic album by Henk Kuijpers, which tells the story of a young and adventurous Dutch investigator called Franka. Through her investigations she had made powerful enemies and, as a consequence, the airplane she’s travelling with is sabotaged and she is plunged into the ocean and swept ashore on a seemingly uninhabited tropical island. I won’t tell the story of her subsequent adventures, but instead concentrate on a particular scene in the story that I have been drawn to for nearly 30 years. Exploring the island, Franka discovers a little lagoon in the middle of the jungle, with a waterfall, flowers, fish and a beautiful bird. She lies down in the water and floats for a while, thinking that this is even nicer than she imagined. For some reason this image has always attracted and soothed me. Sometimes when I’m restless and find it hard to fall asleep, I try to imagine that I’m Franka floating in the lagoon.

The reason why this image has come back to me at this point is connected to my recent trip to Thailand. One day I participated in a boat trip to a place they call the Emerald Cave (Tham Morakot) on Ko Mook island. To get to the cave (which is more a crater than a cave) you have to swim approximately 80 meters (87 yards) through a pitch-dark tunnel with bats. Once you get out of the tunnel, you’re in a secret lagoon with shallow water, a small sandy beach and towering cliffs on all sides. The only way to get in is to swim through the tunnel or fly there. While admiring the view, I got a bit chilly as the air was cooler in the crater and my clothes were wet. I decided to get back in the water to warm myself, and suddenly I had a notion of lying down in the water to float for a while. That way I could admire the surrounding cliffs and sky without straining my neck. It wasn’t until much later that I realised what I’d done. I’d been Franka for a while. For some reason this thought really cheers me, and I’ve decided that I’m going to make a Franka wall quilt with this scene to remind me of my special moment.

© Henk Kuijpers 1979, Interpresse and Carlsen/if 1981