Thursday, September 10, 2009

"The Promise" quilt

This week's project is finished, here's a scan. It is a 4" square quilt, made on a base of Timtex, a firm batting type material. The blocks were exchanged tonight at a fun meeting - there were twenty-nine participants and everyone did a great job! I wish I could show you all of them but they are going to be submitted for a possible magazine article and I can't let the cat out of the bag! It is a great collection of small art quilts.
The sky is a commercial batik fabric, selected for it's blue shade and lavender "clouds". The background of the center section is also a commercial batik fabric - I hand carved a stamp of trees for the image in the center and I love how it turned out! Little green beads are the buds on the branches (I started out doing french knots but after seven little quilts my fingers were very sore and I switched to beads).
The dark green grass is hand-dyed cheesecloth (dyed by Ellen Anne Eddy, the amazing quilter). I use her cheesecloth in a lot of my quilt and collage projects - it adds great texture and she dyes in a wide range of colors. Yummy stuff.
The bottom section "lawn" is hand-dyed green fabric with large dots I painted with Lumiere paint. Well, I should say "stamped". I used the little round erasers used for white-erase boards. They are sold at Staples and come in three sizes. A fun little tool! I outlined them in black Sharpie marker.
I made thirty-nine of these but only needed 29 (I really must start writing things down!). I have an idea for the ones that are left and will working on that in between other things. I'll post a photo when I'm done.
I was off to a slow start on this project, I have a little pile of sketches on my desk - ideas that started out "brilliant" but that were discarded because they weren't "it". I love what I wound up doing and received many compliments at the exchange.
That's it from me this week, I'm going to pack a suitcase and head to Atlantic City to play in a Women's poker tournament at the Borgata... top prize should be somewhere around $20,000 - wish me luck! I'll let you know how I did when I get back :)

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