Falling Leaves

FALLING LEAVES

This quilt is the third in a series that will consist of four or perhaps more quilts with the theme LEAVES.

The challenge this time was EXTREME.
At first I thought of heavy embellishment with lots beads and embroidery, but finally I come to think of some design guidelines.

Simplify, Exaggerate and Repeat. For example, simplify your images, exaggerate the contrast, repeat images, colors and similar shapes and lines.

The inspiration photo is the foliage of an eucalyptus tree. See below.

I have tried to simplify the image, exaggerate the contrast with just a few colors with high contrast among them, repeated the colors and repeated similar shapes.

Although I am not sure that this quilt can be called Extreme, perhaps only by comparison with my two first "Leaf Quilts".

The background is a commercial cotton fabric. The red dot come with the fabric, as well as the red raw edged appliquéd circles, that I have cut out from other parts of the background fabric. The light leaves and dots are white cotton stamped and stenciled with gold, bronze and black acrylic paint by means of a Gelli Plate.

The background leaves are painted with a gold Markal Oil Paintstick and machine quilted with a gold metallic thread.

The inspiration and process for making my "Stone Love" quilt

In 2012 at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham UK I attended a class called "Digital imagery in stitched textiles" with Sandra Meech.

The aim of the course was to make the connection between the images we take with our cameras for inspiration, painted surfaces we do for fun and their important connection to fabric and stitch through collage.

For this class we were asked to bring several black-and-white photocopies, different saturated, on cartridge paper, of something we would like to to use and work with during the class and also one or two pages with our personal writing, describing the theme of our choice.

As Sandra said "The use of personal imagery and writing is a wonderful way of expressing a personal theme".

As I love stones and stonewalls my choice/theme was a very old church ruin, Karnbo church ruin, situated very near where I live.

I took a lot of photos of the ruin, above are just a few of them. I also wrote an A4 page by hand describing when it was built (during the 1200 hundred century) rebuilt etc. With lots of photo copies of the church ruin and the handwritten text we started to paint every page with diluted acrylic paints. Brusho, Koh-i-noor (bright water-based dyes used for painting on paper) and procion dyes also work very well.

As a background for the collage one white A4 copy paper was folded vertical  and one was folded horizontal.

5 - 7 pieces of paper in different widths were then torn from the painted theme photocopies and personal handwriting and then glued to the white copy papers. Our collages where after that photographed for the computer and printed on fabrics.

Left:
Vertical collage on paper and
below:
The paper collage printed on fabric.

Landscape collage printed on paper.

The same paper collage printed on fabric.

As another exercise I tore paper strips from my black-and-white photocopies and also a little piece from   a painted paper and made a collage.

The collage on the right hand side was then my inspiration for the Latitude Quilt´s  March quilt with the theme LOVE.

I called my quilt "Stone Love"

Sandra Meech has written several books. In my possession I have her three latest.

Connecting art to stitch. 2009. ISBN: 978-1-9063-8810-2

Connecting design to stitch. 2012. ISBN: 978-1-60705-622-5

Creative quilts. Unlock your creativity with design classes and techniques. 

2013. ISBN: 978-1-849941-112

Those books can not be to warmly recommended.

Enjoy

Ann-Mari

SPACED BOTTLES

When I saw the theme "Space" I come to think of the Swedish painter Philip von Schantz and his paintings of vases and bottles which fools your eye and give you a sense of mystery. So one of his paintings was my inspiration for this piece.
Below is a link to this painting.

http://art.findartinfo.com/images/artwork/2012/7/a002810602-001.jpg

To try to convey space I started to paint a white background fabric with Dye-na-Flow acrylic paint. When still wet, newspaper masks with the shapes of bottles were placed on top and then sun printed. The bottle shapes that developed in a lighter shade than the background were then machine quilted. A second layer of fabric bottle shapes were raw edged appliquéd and finally as a third layer there were some organza shaped bottles added on top.
The piece is framed with a narrow binding.

Stone Love

The theme for March was LOVE and as this word can be interpreted in so many ways I come to think
of my love for stones and the way they have always fascinated me with their shapes, textures and colors. Not far from where I live there is a church ruin from the 12:th century, which slowly is falling to pieces but with still some lovely stonewalls remaining. Those stonewalls have inspired me to make this  stone piece.

For the stones I used fabrics that I had rust dyed and also some fabrics crackled with flour paste and painted with black acrylic paint.

The stones are raw edged appliquéd. Threads used are cotton and the batting is 80/20 cotton polyester.

How to make a Flour-paste crackle effect.

Last year I took an online course with Ineke Berlyn about making Journal Quilts, one piece for every month but with the same theme to explore, the same size and with a new technique every month. My choice of theme was "Urns" and one technique I learnt one month, was to make pattern with crackled flour paste and acrylic paint.

Above is my March JQ with a piece of flour crackled fabric. Size A4

Recipe: 
Prepare a 12" or 20 cm square of light or white cotton to make a piece of fabric with a crackle effect.
Gradually mix 100 grams of strong or ordinary white bread flour with about 150 ml of water with a whisk to make a smooth, medium thick pancake of batter.
Place the white fabric onto a some old newspaper and spread the batter in a thin layer over the fabric, using an old credit card or a squeegee. You can use any kind of flour. Whole wheat flour will give a coarser layer of batter and coarser crackle.
Leave to dry flat.
When totally dry you can crackle the flour crust.
Place it on a drop-cloth of plastic, flour- side up.
Mix a dark acrylic paint or fabric paint with a tiny bit of water.
Thoroughly rub it onto the fabric and into the crackles, use different colors if you like.
Leave it to dry again, overnight. Rinse out the flour and wash.

(This can also be done with a piece of dry soda-soaked cotton fabric and procion dye paste, left to cure and wash out. I have never tested this, but I think it would be wort a trial).

You will end up with an interesting textured piece of fabric.

Above are some of my flour crackled fabrics.
Good Luck with your crackling!

Ann-Mari

(Also this year I am making JQ ́s on-line with Ineke Berlyn. The theme is chosen by her and it is landscapes. It is really very challenging and much inspiering). 

Balance?

When this theme "Balance" was announced I thought there were so many possibilities that it should not be too difficult to find a good idea to interpret the theme, but with many options to tackle, it was not so easy any longer. What to choose? The balance practice at the gym was my first thing to ponder about, building towers with lego and blocks were another one, but at the end I chosen to build something with stones. I like stones and organic forms so make something with stones were a good choice, a bit of a challenge though, to make a balanced pile of stones, perhaps impossible?
As I wanted to give the stones different textures I used a lot of different materials, which are raw appliquéd on top of a background fabric dyed with Procion MX Dye.

Materials used are: cotton fabrics, Evolon, wool, paper, Lutradur, textile paint, foil and silk, metallic and wool threads.

Escape

When this theme was announced there was only one thing that appeared in my mind. It was our plot with olive trees and the view from our house in Greece. This really is the place to which I can escape and use my time to all the things that make me happy and creative and with very little "musts".

I chose to make a piece showing the wonderful  view I can enjoy and look at every day when I am there with the olive trees in the foreground and the Messenia Gulf  and the peninsula, on the other side of the Gulf with the high mountain top, the Prophet Elias, 2400 meters over above sea level.

The background is  whole cloth, painted with Dye-na-Flow paint and four patches are sun printed with Dye-na -flow paint, screen printing ink and fabric paint with letter masks made from freezer paper  with the letters esc , as the word esc on the PC keyboard.

On top of this I have printed some olive trees on ExtravOrganza and fused them using white Misty fuse.

Finally the piece is quilted with running stitches and seed stitches with cotton and metallic threads. In order to emphasize the trees I put some paint with Shiva paint sticks on top of the embroidery stitches on top of the trees.

Holiday

This theme was quite a challenge. There were so many thoughts about this word, many positive and some negative, so my first thought was to make a weave of positive and negative memories, printed words on dark and light fabrics and then weave them together.

The word "Memories" also made me think of all those lovely holidays I and my family spent in Italy every spring for many years , about 35-40 years ago. Trying to interpret this lovely time I painted, with acrylic paint, a seascape with sand, water and sky. The beach is stamped with  irregular circles also  seed beads and some cotton beads and stitching were added in order to attain texture.  Parasols, sun and glitter were fused. The piece is hand quilted with silk and metallic threads.

My intention for this quilt was to make a simplified seascape which should give an impression of a peaceful and lovely time on the beach.

This was the first time I made a wholecloth quilt painted with acrylics.

Material used: Cotton fabrics, acrylic paint, seed beads, cotton beads, silk and metallic threads, cotton and polyester batting.