Wake-Up Bells

Today is the final day of Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, and the winners have already been announced, so now I'm safe to publish images of the quilt that was sent there. As I've already mentioned here, the theme this year was In My Garden, and spring was the season that was given to Finland. I chose the lovely snowdrop, and titled the quilt Wake-Up Bells. Here's an image of the whole quilt, as well as process images and some detail shots of the finished quilt. As mentioned, it will be on tour for two years, so I took lots of photos before I sent it off.

The size of the quilt is 30 x 30 cm (12" x 12"). It's a wholecloth printed and painted quilt with collage elements between cotton and a layer of silk organza.

First of all I made a preliminary plan of the quilt on watercolour paper to help me make decisions about the colour scheme and texture before I started adding paint to fabric.

I printed cotton with pigment (textile) paint and various handmade and found stamps, transferred the pattern to the cotton with a mechanical pencil and painted the hair with a brush and pigment paint.

I also printed and spray painted silk organza,

and the cotton fabric that I used to soak up the paint that went trough the sheer organza was used for the back of the quilt.

I outlined the image with Derwent Inktense pencils, and started adding the collage elements.

I added the organza over the cotton base fabric, free-motion quilted the whole thing and added hand embroidery as a finishing touch. Here are some close-ups of the finished quilt:

If you're interested in this way of working, I recommend looking up Melanie Testa's book Inspired to Quilt. Melanie works with dye in the book, but it's also possible to use pigment paint, as I have done, if that's more accessible to you.

Thanks for visiting!

It Started with a Stencil

If you follow this blog, you know by now that I recently participated in an online stencil workshop with Melanie Testa (Stencil Magic; there is a rolling admission, so you can still sign up!), during which I made my own stencils. Not a lot of them, but a few I really like. If you want to have a look at photographs of them, as well as descriptions of the inspiration and processes involved, hop over to my Flickr photostream.

I haven't been as active as I wanted to with my stencils, but as I said, I have made some stencils that I really like, and I'm thrilled that the course work has already started to pay off. At the moment I'm working on not one, but three little purses with my own stencilled imagery. I'm basically following Melanie Testa's processes for creating layered textile art, and pattern for a "pretty purse". I'll supply you with a list of sources at the end of this post.

First I took a piece of cotton and monoprinted it, and then I stencilled some nonsense script on it with one of the stencils I'd made. (I masked off part of the cotton with Magic/freezer paper).

Then I took a piece of silk organza and monoprinted that, followed by printing on the organza with my own poppy stencil. It doesn't look like much yet, but wait and see!

I added more printing on the cotton layer, and then I collaged a poppy over the printed cloth. The poppy isn't quite natural from this viewpoint, but it'll be alright in the end.

And this is what the layers look like together. In the background you can see the map I made as a guide.

And here the quilt sandwich is machine quilted, with a few hand embroidered details, and ready for the final steps: to cut out the purse shape, add a zipper and sew it all together.

And, as I said, I have two more purses on the go, so stay tuned. I will show you the finished purses quite soon, I believe. I'm ready to start quilting the other two tomorrow.

If you want to know more about the layering process and the pretty purse, check out these sources (all by Melanie Testa):

General process for creating layered textile art:
Inspired to Quilt

Pretty purses:
Inspired to Quilt
Quilting Arts Magazine issue 36 (December 2008/January 2009) (the link will take you to the digital edition of the magazine)
Quilting Arts TV, episode 304

Thanks for visiting, and please return soon for images of the finished pretty purses. I'm very excited! - Annika

Final Report From My Dyecation

I've been away from my blog for a while, as things got a little crazy here again. But now I'm back with a few final pictures from my dyecation. I still haven't shown you the third, dark gradation that I did after the medium and light gradations. I must admit that I didn't think I would like the dark colours, and thought they would be too murky and gloomy for my taste. But luckily I was wrong. This gradation produced some of the deep purples and plums that are my favourite colours to wear, and some beautiful petroleum blue.

 I was left with quite a lot of unused dye, which I used for overdyeing

black-on-white fabric...

and white-on-white fabric.

And here's a trick I learned from Melanie Testa (Inspired to Quilt):

- dyeing embroidery floss with the help of floss holders!

Doesn't that make you want to grab a needle?

And here's a week's worth of dyeing adventures:

These are among my favourite fabrics:

I'm having a short break from dyeing now, but I will soon continue with the warm gradation (golden yellow, scarlet and medium blue). Then I will soon need to come up with a way of using all my fabrics, because there isn't any more room in my tiny flat...

Thanks for dropping by and have a great week! - Annika

Advent Doodlendar

I’ve been thinking about getting an Advent calendar. I’m childish enough to enjoy that sort of thing. “But what type?” I ask myself. I have been assuming that it should be one that contains chocolate, but I haven’t been able to make my mind up what to buy. The chocolate in the kiddy calendars isn’t very good, and I felt that an ordinary box of chocolates was a bit boring. I’ll get enough of those anyway before Christmas is over. And then I had an idea: I’ll make a Doodlendar, i.e. a calendar with a doodle a day until Christmas. Next I remembered one of the exercises that Melanie Testa suggests in her book Inspired to Quilt. In the exercise you draw a grid on fabric and fill the squares with quilting patterns. Some of the areas are left blank, and those areas form a figure (in the book a flower stem). I’m going to apply this exercise with paper and ink, and fill a square a day until Christmas. By 24 December I’ll have a completed page with patterns and an image formed by blank spaces. I haven’t drawn much since July and this will be a simple and fun exercise for me to get accustomed to holding a pen again. I will upload the Doodlendar to my Flickr account daily, where you can follow my progress day by day if you wish. That’s my Advent calendar to you, my reader. I hope you’ll enjoy it!

Here’s the Doodlendar waiting for its first square to be filled with pattern:

 And now, to offer you something more to look at than an empty paper with a grid, I also offer you these crocheted cuffs that I recently finished. They’ve been living in my UFO-basket for quite a while, until I took pity on them and finally completed them. The pattern is from the book Virka muddar! by Maria Gullberg - a book filled with cuffs inspired by the crocheted wrist warmers that were used by both women and men in 19th century Scandinavia.

Thanks for visiting and see you again on 1 December!

I needed Something for my Bathroom

In my last post I wrote about the Franka wall quilt that I want to make to remind myself of a special moment. If anyone wonders, I haven’t got very far yet. I’ve scanned the image, resized it, printed it and blue-tacked it to my wall. And then other things started to demand my attention. I have a little project for a friend that I need to finish. I also have another project for a friend that I need to get cracking with. And I needed something for my bathroom.

The ‘something for my bathroom’ won this time, and so I picked out Rashida Coleman-Hale’s book ‘I Love Patchwork’.(Follow this link if you want to look inside the book.) I love this book, because it’s full of charming little projects that are just calling out to me: ‘Make me, make me!’ I decided to make a small basket for bathroom stuff based on the utensil basket she describes in the book. This is the result:

I used mainly commercial fabrics, but one of the fabrics is my own. The one with a citrus pattern is made with thickened Procion MX dye, soy wax and monoprinting. I followed the instructions in Melanie Testa’s book Inspired to Quilt when I designed it. The citrus shapes are made with a plastic thingy that came out of a jar of sundried tomatoes in oil, which I dipped in melted soy wax and applied to the fabric. I then painted around and inside the soy wax shapes with thickened dye, covered the shapes with a new layer of wax to protect them and monoprinted the background. Here's the basket put to use:

Hälsningar från Kvinnornas julmässa 2010

Det har varit bråda tider i jultomtens verkstad på sistone. Därför har jag inte hunnit uppdatera bloggen på ett tag. I dag inleddes Kvinnornas julmässa och mamma och jag var på plats, ivriga att sälja våra alster. Mamma har mest pulsvärmare och andra stickade produkter, och jag har min docka, en tavla, några broscher, julkort, askar och pulsvärmare. Skrålla ner för ett bildreportage direkt från mässan.


Greetings from Women's Christmas fair 2010

It's been busy in Santa's workshop lately. That's why I haven't had time to update my blog for a while. Today the Women's Christmas Fair started, and mum and I were there, eager to sell our stuff. Mum mainly sells  wrist warmers and other knitwear, and I have my doll, a wall quilt, some brooches, Christmas cards, boxes and wrist warmers. Below is news in pictures straight from the fair.

Mamma och jag vid vårt stånd

Mum and me at our stand

Min blygsamma del av ståndet

My modest share of the stand

Tavlan, som är den första tavlan som jag har färdigställt med de tekniker som  

Melanie Testa lär ut i sin bok "Inspired to Quilt".

My wall quilt, which is the first quilt that I've finished using the techniqes that are taught by  

Melanie Testa in her book 'Inspired to Quilt'

Maskinkviltning och handbroderi

Machine quilting and hand embroidery

Stickade broscher

Knitted brooches

Julkort tillverkade av "papperstyg" 

(en teknik som bl.a. Kelli Nina Perkins och Beryl Taylor lär ut)

Christmas cards meade with paper fabric 

(a technique that is taught by e.g. Kelli Nina Perkins and Beryl Taylor)