SAL Update: Green Iguana #37
November 24, 2019 at 8:32 am | Posted in Embroidery | 15 CommentsTags: cross-stitch, SAL
I’m on the last page of the pattern! Here’s the last update:
And here’s where I am today:
Looks doable till the end of the year, although looks are deceiving with this kind of work. Can’t wait to see him finished!
Here are the other members of the SAL who are posting today. Make sure to check out their work, it’s amazing: Avis, Claire, Gun, Carole, Sue, Christina, Kathy, Margaret, Cindy, Linda, Heidi, Jackie, Sunny, Hayley, Megan, Deborah, Mary Margaret, Renee, Jenny, Carmela, Jocelyn, Sharon, Daisy, Anne and Connie.
If you would like to join in please contact Avis, who will give you full details.
Quilt Show 2019 – My Year in Quilting
November 13, 2019 at 7:56 pm | Posted in Patchwork, Quilting | 5 CommentsTags: exhibition
Last weekend brought around our group’s annual quilt show, which is as good an excuse as any to look back on what I did quilt-wise this year.
First, the community project. As usual, I helped put together a beautiful quilt to raffle off for charity. This is this year’s edition:
Love the quilt, as well as the long-arm quilting which fits the pattern very well. The money we raised goes to Herzkissen München together with almost 200 pillows we also made this year.
Second, our yearly challenge. I’ve already posted about my contribution, here it is again:
And here’s the whole wall with everybody’s contributions:
My personal quilts all ended up on the same panel, which was not very surprising since it seems I had quite the theme going:
The quilt on the upper right is very beautiful, but not by me, but by a fellow group member. It does fit well though, since it was made for the same exhibition as mine on the lower left. The one on the upper left is the one I wanted to make for said exhibition, but didn’t quite pull off at the time. And the one on the lower right is my scrappy colour wheel.
Since I was pretty busy this year overall, this is quite a good haul, I think. My next project is on the table, waiting for me finding the courage to actually start it. It will be a challenge, for sure – more on that when I actually have a better idea of what I’m doing.
Inktober 2019
November 3, 2019 at 7:31 pm | Posted in Drawing | 1 CommentTags: Inktober
I’ve been keeping in touch with a few of the artists I met at the Dublin 2019 Worldcon via Facebook and my newly created Twitter account. At the beginning of October they started talking about and posting drawings tagged with something called Inktober. I got curious, read up on things and spontaneously decided to play as well.
It’s not as if there’s a dearth of art supplies around here, so I dug around for an empty enough sketchbook and my ink pens. What I found was an half-full sketchbook where I’d worked on designs from a zentangle book for textile artists. Not wanting to commit to anything complicated, I decided to keep to the zentangle-sized 9*9 cm squares and to fill one of those for every day of October. Since I can waste huge amounts of time to come up with the “right” idea and was sure that would derail me sooner or later, I also decided to use the official prompts from the website linked above. I continue to find that my creativity works best when I don’t let it roam completely free, but give it some constraints to hang on to. I must have made the right choice, since I made it all the way through the month, doing a small ink drawing for every day:
The prompt is in the captions, and you can click on the images for larger versions. And, so you can see how my sketchbook looks like, here’s my favourite page spread:
This is also now a very full sketchbook, I had to squeeze the last sketch into the absolutely last square available. Yay!
Still noodling over what I’m going to take away from this. Left to my own devices, I’ll probably get back to drawing for the next vacation diary sometime next summer. This is something that needs consistent practice, and I’m not quite sure how to go about achieving that. I’ll probably never draw for drawings sake, but I’d sure love to be able to confidently get ideas from brain to paper, where they can be examined and evaluated for committing art (usually using fabric and thread). Leaving this here for the moment as food for thought.
SAL Update: Green Iguana #36
November 3, 2019 at 8:38 am | Posted in Embroidery | 14 CommentsTags: cross-stitch, SAL
Progress! In the last three weeks, I got back to regularly working on Mr. Iguana. Here’s where I came from:
And here’s today’s version:
He’s got a nose! In fact, I’m all finished filling him in on the second-to-last page. Next up is the background above, and then I’ll be down to the last pattern page, of which quite a bit is already done since I’m generally following the colours across page borders. Maybe an end-of-year finish is still possible?
Here are the other members of the SAL who are posting today. Make sure to check out their work, it’s amazing: Avis, Claire, Gun, Carole, Sue, Christina, Kathy, Margaret, Cindy, Linda, Heidi, Jackie, Sunny, Hayley, Megan, Deborah, Mary Margaret, Renee, Jenny, Carmela, Jocelyn, Sharon, Daisy, Anne and Connie.
If you would like to join in please contact Avis, who will give you full details.
A Scrappy Colour Wheel
October 27, 2019 at 7:57 pm | Posted in Patchwork, Quilting | 4 CommentsTags: english paper piecing
In an attempt to make some space in my scrap box, I started to make 1-inch hexagons and rhombs a while ago. After I finished going through the box, I was unsurprisingly in possession of a rainbows worth of hexies. So, I started playing with possible arrangements for them. Hm, how about making a colour wheel? This is what I came up with:
I tried to go from lighter hues in the middle to darker ones outside, but since I was working with whatever I had available in my scrapbox, it’s far from perfect in colour distribution. I do like the overall effect, though. There are quite a few memories to projects past in there, as well. This is the last project that I’ll be showing in our yearly quilt show in a couple of weeks, and everything is finished and prepared. Off to new adventures, more on which soon!
SAL Update: Green Iguana #35
October 13, 2019 at 8:04 am | Posted in Embroidery | 15 CommentsTags: cross-stitch, SAL
I got distracted by other projects in the last weeks, so there’s not that much to show. Here’s where we were three weeks ago:
And here’s where I am today:
I think the current slow progress might persist for another bit, since I have other things going on that take up my time for hand-work. For one, I got sucked into Inktober, which is a challenge to make a drawing in ink every day in October. I’m posting my results on twitter, and will probably make a summary post here once the month is over. Haven’t missed a day yet! The other thing is that our yearly quilt exhibition is coming up at the beginning of November, so there’s lots of finishing things going on.
Here are the other members of the SAL who are posting today. Make sure to check out their work, it’s amazing: Avis, Claire, Gun, Carole, Sue, Christina, Kathy, Margaret, Cindy, Helen, Linda, Mary Margaret, Heidi, Jackie, Sunny, Hayley, Megan, Catherine, Deborah, Clare, Renee, Jenny, Carmela, Jocelyn, Sharon, Daisy and Anne.
If you would like to join in please contact Avis, who will give you full details.
Finished? – Finished!
October 6, 2019 at 8:49 am | Posted in Patchwork, Quilting | 4 CommentsTags: Beading
A few weeks ago, I showed you my colourful find while cleaning up the craft room. A few days later, I did indeed have a finished quilt, as promised:
I used simple horizontal lines for quilting, reminding me of early pictures of solar spectra that often have lots of thin grainy lines. At that point, the quilt had a tunnel and a label, and was technically finished. But while this treatment was intentionally much simpler than what I had initially planned, I felt something was missing.
So out came the beads and sequins, and during the last couple of weeks, I added them, and am much happier with the result now:
Here’s a detail:
The beads remind me of the sparkling you get when sunlight is broken up by a prism or crystal. I also think it makes the asymmetric layout of the quilt work better than before.
SAL Update: Green Iguana #34
September 22, 2019 at 8:32 am | Posted in Embroidery | 14 CommentsTags: cross-stitch, SAL
As promised, I’m back with actual progress on Mr. Iguana this time. Here’s the state of affairs from six weeks ago:
And this is where I am today:
I’m slowly but surely filling in the area between his mouth and his eye. Maybe I can finish him before 2019 is over?
Here are the other members of the SAL who are posting today. Make sure to check out their work, it’s amazing: Avis, Claire, Gun, Carole, Sue, Christina, Kathy, Margaret, Cindy, Helen, Linda, Mary Margaret, Heidi, Jackie, Sunny, Hayley, Megan, Catherine, Deborah, Clare, Renee, Jenny, Carmela, Jocelyn and Sharon. A very warm welcome to Susan and Anne, our two new members this time!
If you would like to join in please contact Avis, who will give you full details.
Fraunhofer Lines
September 14, 2019 at 2:45 pm | Posted in Patchwork, Quilting | 3 CommentsThere was a Worldcon in Dublin, and among other things, I re-found my long-lost quilting bug there! What happened? Basically, I spent a lot of time before and at the convention looking at the fabulous convention art created by Iain Clark. At some point during that time, the idea that Green Woman needs to be a quilt got into my brain. In Dublin I finally managed to meet Iain (given the size of the convention, it took some coordination) and asked him whether I could use his image as inspiration for a quilt, and he kindly said yes. So, of course now I’m itching to start.
First step: bring the craft room into a condition that will actually support a new start. During clean-up, I found a piece of fabric I had abandoned last year when working on my contribution for my local quilt shop’s anniversary competition. I already wrote about the quilt I actually entered here.
My original idea was very different to what I ended up with. I painted a solar spectrum on some fabric and wanted to show the Fraunhofer lines – black lines that appear on the spectrum, their frequencies indicating the existence of certain elements in the outer layers of the sun. I wasn’t happy with how the colours came out – too muted for my taste. So I threw that piece of fabric into a corner and ended up doing something completely different.
While cleaning the craft room, I found that piece of fabric, and for the life of me can’t remember why I was unhappy with the colours. Sure, they’re not as brillant as can be, but if you look at a solar spectrum that’s created by a prism, you’ll see quite a muted rainbow as well. So I decided to run with my original idea and finish this up before starting anything new. A day or so later, I had a top:
The lines are a flat cotton yarn sewed down using a zig-zag stitch. The sides are a very dark blue batik I bought for this project last year. I like the circles and dots – they remind my of stars and planets, fitting for a quilt about starlight. Here’s a detail:
By now, it’s already basted and quilted, and my guess would be there’ll be a finish posted to this very blog quite soon.
Irish Crochet Lace Workshop at Worldcon
September 4, 2019 at 6:13 pm | Posted in Conventions, Crochet, Lace | 1 CommentTags: Dublin2019, Irish Crochet Lace
Quite a few months ago, I made a suggestion to the Programme team at Dublin 2019 – an Irish Worldcon that when having a Worldcon in Ireland, wouldn’t it be lovely to have a workshop on Irish Crochet lace, which is one kind of lace that’s native to Ireland? Having made that suggestion, I was pretty sure that a) it would be taken up and b) I’d be asked to teach the workshop. I was right on both counts.
Basically, it meant that on top of everything else, I needed to find a suitable pattern, collect the necessary materials and prepare a handout. The pattern was easy: I had seen this shamrock in one of my historical intruction manuals before, and it does have all the basic ingredients that make Irish Crochet different from other kinds of lace crochet:
Irish crochet lace aims to imitate dimensional needle laces by using two threads – a fairly thin thread for the crochet stitches and a thicker “cord” which other stitches are worked over, replacing the loops of chain stitches often found in modern lace crochet.
Materials were also fairly easy: I wanted participants to use the same materials I used for my class samples, so I had a good idea of how much was needed and the instructions would work with the threads. Since the thread sizes in historical needlework books are incomparable to what’s used today, finding materials that work together and adjusting the pattern to match is often the hard part of recreating those patterns. The real challenge was finding the right-sized crochet hooks. None of my collection of small hooks has anything resembling metric sizes. I made a guess that 1.25 or 1.5 mm hooks should work, and the lovely people at This is Knit reserved their stock for me. Since hooks in this size don’t seem to be a heavily sought-after item and I needed 10 of them, we ended up with a few 1.75mm hooks in the mix as well, which in hindsight may have been a bit too big.
So I made a couple of samples in May, got distracted by all the other Worldcon stuff after that, and made another sample just a couple of weeks before leaving for Dublin (this was mostly to figure out how much thread the pattern needed, so I could prepare the thread packages for participants), and wrote the handout on pretty much the last weekend possible that enabled me to still get it copied before leaving.
The workshop itself was fully booked, as I’ve come to expect for this kind of workshop at a Worldcon – they all were, no matter what the subject matter. We had fun, and I hope everybody got something out of it. For those who couldn’t get in, and others who may want to try Irish crochet lace, here’s the handout.
Happy to answer any questions!
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