Poppy Love

After not having been very active on this blog for so long, it feels a bit difficult to get started again. What should I write? How should I start? Should I apologise to you, my reader, for my inactivity? Well, I think I'll just say that there's a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens, and with so many things going on and such a big change in my life over the past year, blogging had to take second place. But I missed sharing my projects and discoveries with you, so I will make an attempt to breathe new life into this blog now. And I will start by sharing a little piece of quilt art that I finished recently.

I started working on this mini quilt in December, and I've shared a couple of process images before here. It was basically finished and part of an exhibition in January (link), but I wasn't 100 % happy with it, so it's been hanging around looking a bit forlorn since the exhibition, until I took pity on it and added what I felt was necessary. And now I'm quite pleased with it. I attached it to a canvas frame, which will make it easier to display, as well as make it look less like a little potholder on the wall and more like a proper piece of art.

Ok, enough talk. Here are the images:

The size of the mini quilt itself is 15,5 x 15,5 cm (6" x 6") and the techniques include monoprinting, stencilling, fabric markers, fabric collage, Free-motion machine quilting, hand embroidery and beading. The name of the quilt is Papaver (2013). Papaver is the Latin name for poppy.

Thanks for reading! More to come soon, because I'm bursting with projects and new things to try. :-)

On the First Day of Christmas...

Happy holidays everyone! I’m sorry that I’ve been a stranger to this blog all autumn. I’ve been working hard, and I guess sometimes you just have to give yourself a break and accept that you don’t always have time and energy for everything. I’ve neglected a lot of the things I normally love to do, but now I feel it’s time to reclaim those things. I guess it’s all about planning: I need to consciously make time for art again, as well as blogging. I’m starting with a short update on what I’ve been up to so far during my Christmas break.

I’ve been working on two new Pretty Purses:

Purse 1, quilted (in progress)

Purse 2, quilted (in progress)

and with added hand embroidery (in progress)

I’m also working on a mini quilt with the same poppy motif I used last summer.

Surface designed fabric ready to be quilted

Quilted, and with some hand embroidery (in progress)

And, joy of joys, I did some work in my sketchbook, inspired by patterns I found on a gift wrap and a flower pot:

And of course I have a Christmas knitting project…

for when I want to relax in the sofa with Fia the Terri(fi)er. (Mum’s busy hands can be seen knitting in the background.)

I hope you're having a wonderful holiday season! Thanks for dropping by! - Annika

Good Things Come in Threes

Here they finally are, my little pretty purses! And I'm pretty pleased with them, if I may say so myself.

Let me give you a couple of hot tips. There are two things that helped me accomplish three purses in a relatively short space of time. I designed these purses with a particular purpose in mind, you see, and I had little time to fuff about. I needed to be efficient.

As regular followers know, these purses are inspired by and based on the techniques Melanie Testa presents in her book Inspired to Quilt (please refer back to this post for more info). In the book Melanie uses thickened Procion MX dyes to design her fabrics. However, I felt I wanted to do things quick and dirty this time, without having to soda soak or batch fabric. So I used fabric paints. Fabric paints work very well for monoprinting, as long as you keep in mind that you are dealing with a medium that dries fairly quickly. Have a plan before you spread the paint on the printing plate, otherwise you will discover that most of the paint got stuck to the plate instead of the fabric. Fabric paint gives the fabric a slightly plastic feel, but with monoprinting it isn't as bad as I expected, as the layer of paint is very thin. What I appreciated most was that the paint dried quickly, so there was hardly any waiting time at all. I was surprised by and pleased with the result, and I have come to appreciate fabric paints more after this experience.

My second hot tip is to work in a series. I'm not particularly keen on doing the same thing over and over again, I get bored too easily, but working in a series definitely helps you to produce more art, as you don't have to "reinvent the wheel" with every new piece. You learn things with each piece, and can apply your insights immediately in the next piece, so there is educational value in it as well. And when the motif is fixed, as it is in this case, I was able to concentrate on other things, such as colour and pattern. I'm not planning to always work in a series from now on, but I've realised that it is definitely something worth considering every now and then.

Here are a couple of detail shots (I love the way the monoprint makes the bud look hairy - that was serendipity):

As these are purses, I wanted the insides to be just as neat as the outsides, so I used embroidery thread also in the bobbin. That also helped me to get rid of any problems with thread tension and unwanted bobbin thread creeping up to the front.

I also bound the edges on the inside and added my own tag.

The tag is made from a piece of cotton ribbon with an inkjet iron-on transfer print.

And that's my pretty purses! I had a lot of fun with these.

Thanks for visiting and see you again soon! - Annika