To dream to stitch

I seem to have had little time for blogging lately although I have had time to catch up on what everyone else has been doing. I received an award from Micki for which I am very grateful and have decided to put it on the side bar of this blog. Thanks Micki, do go and visit her site, she does some lovely felting and quilting.

I have to pass this on so I am going to include, Donna who has just started blogging again but does some beautiful work. Carol-Anne who does the most exquisite embroidery. Geta whose shadow quilting has to be seen to be believed and she also has the cutest new kitten. Kathryn She does food which is mouthwatering. And finally Pippa who is so good at sharing the outcomes of her classes, inspiring others to take part. There is also another site that I have found thanks to Cheryl which may be of interest to quilters, it is called Quilter Blogs.I have not had time to really check it out but what I have seen looks real quality.

So what have I been doing of late apart from working? I have managed to have some disasters and some results that I am quite pleased with. I'll leave the disasters until last. I have managed to finish the little wigwam book from Maggie Grey's lessons and liked the result so much that I am in the process of making a couple of boxes with it. Hopefully they will get finished today. They will be housing presents that I have to deliver next Thursday and Saturday, weather permitting so I'll post them later.



The other interesting piece came as a result of an accident. I have enrolled for Textured Surface, an online class from Fibre in-Form and as the class was almost finished simply read through the notes - which, incidentally, are excellent. Right at the end came a paragraph on using MM metal effect paint and rust/patina activator. I had completely forgotten that I had a set of these lurking in the garage so decided to try them out on some quilting samples that I had done a while ago. I painted the samples with white emulsion first and then applied the paint and activator. It reacted far more than I remembered it doing previously but a wash of black ink and some Treasure Gold integrated it more. I now have two sample pieces which show some interesting texture and a piece that I have made into a book - I want to do a series of work on my garden so I might use it for that.





A word of warning - I had to stitch around the book by hand. I tried it on my machine and it just shredded the thread. So if you want to machine stitch - do it first!

I have started to add texture to the Hawk design that I am embroidering for my Sumptuous Surfaces course. It took me a long time to get going but in the end I decided to use one stitch and build up the layers in threads of varying weights. I have a long way to go yet but at least its on the way.



And finally to the disaster. Any of you who have been following this blog may remember that I did a couple of journal quilts a while back and was waiting to decide on the quilting before I finished them. Well I guess that I should not have bothered. I am reasonably happy with the first one but the second has far too much going on for my taste and is heading for the scrap bag. I remember Ricky Tims once saying that the quilting design should be planned as you go along and not left until the quilt is finished. I should have listened to him I think.