adventures of a quilting diva

Here’s my latest quilt, “Magritte and Me” (17″x23″). I created it for the FFFC Challenge #46, Geology with Unexpected Color.

I really love working with the little paintbrush strokes of fabric. It’s relaxing and fun to do and I like the way it turns out. I have several more ideas for this method of fusible applique quilt that I want to try.

Here’s a detail shot of the castle. This quilt is completely in hand dyed fabric. There are 3 different hand dyed whites. Painters will tell you that there is a difference between white paints and it’s the same with white fabric. Once it’s cut up into bits, you can’t always tell which is which until you place them side by side. Then you can easily see this one is a blue white, that one is a yellow white, and the other is a pink white.

I originally painted the reproduction below  for an exercise in a painting class. My reference was one of those little color plates in a fine art book. Remember when fine art books had those sections of color plates in the middle? If you were actually reading the text you always had to flip back and forth between the pages to see what the author was talking about. You can see a print of the original Le Chateau Des Pyrenees by Rene Magritte on Amazon.

I’m not sure what Magritte’s meaning of The Castle in the Pyrenees is. I read somewhere that he made it for a friend. I liked the image well enough to stare at it for hours on end while working on it, so I chose it for my original assignment and once again for this challenge.

“To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.” ~ René Magritte

Earlier this month I went to a guild meeting and saw a lecture by Tammie Bowser (www.mosaicquilt.com). She’s the one who does those fabulous photo quilts that are made up of pixels of fabric. You could say I got bit by the picture quilt bug so I tried my hand at a picture quilt of my own. But I didn’t want to use pixels. I was thinking more along the lines of brush strokes of fabric.

Coincidentally while reorganizing my studio I came across this acrylic study I did some 20 years ago. Like a quilter warming up on a practice sandwich before stitching on the real quilt, painters also warm up before hitting the real canvas. When I found it I knew immediately what the subject of my picture quilt would be.

And here’s the final result. It’s done with random pieces of fabric stuck to Lite Steam A Seam 2 on a fusible interfacing background. (My personal preference for this kind of quilt is the Lite, but Regular Steam A Seam 2 works in a pinch.) It’s completely done with fabric. No paints, inks, or thread were used to add detail. I quilted the picture part with invisible thread so it would give texture and hold the layers together without altering the colors of the fabric.

No Paints Were Harmed in the Making of This Quilt
©2010 by Laura West Kong

I was so charmed by this quilt that I started another one just a few days later. Unfortunately in the process I used up my complete supply of both Lite and Regular Steam A Seam 2, so quilt #2 is at a standstill for now. Considering that the lecture was less than 2 weeks ago and I’ve already finished 1-1/2 picture quilts, you shouldn’t have to wait very long for me to finish the second quilt once I get to the store.

The second quilt is also from an already painted study, but when I’m finished with that one I plan on doing a real-life still life directly with fabric as if I were painting, no photography. There’s something special about working from still life and live models that you don’t get from photographic references. I don’t know what it is, but I miss it.

In a way it’s a good thing that I ran out of all my Steam A Seam 2. Otherwise I would have been tempted to stick Steam A Seam 2 onto my entire stash and cut it all up into random pieces. Then I wouldn’t be able to make any other kinds of quilts. I suppose I could go fabric shopping then, and I would have a grand selection of fabric “paint”, so that wouldn’t be all bad.

happy quilting! ^_^

Because every binding should be fantabulous, check out my Easy Lesson article in the April/May 2010 issue of Quilters Newsletter Magazine, Bead-Dazzled Bindings.

Find out how to make the embellished binding in my Zéphirine Drouhin and Latte quilts (Latte shown at right). Or take my new workshop, Bling Your Bindings! and learn eight fun embellished binding techniques.

If you’re looking for the QNM Online Extra step-by-step photos of my silk dyeing adventures, click here.

There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned looming deadline to jump start a person’s creativity. As you can see below, my African Folklore Embroidery, A Beadiful Day, is finally completed and ready to take a road trip {to Road to California that is}.Genuine deadlines work better than fake ones, but in the absence of a real deadline it can’t hurt to make one up anyways.

If you’re in the neighborhood, drop by and visit the African Folklore Embroidery exhibit at Road to California, January 14-17, 2010 in Ontario, California. To learn more about African Folklore Embroidery visit the African Folklore Embroidery website.

In 2005 I created this quilt, Thai Dreamin’, for the Hancock Fabrics/St. Jude Hospital Quilt of Dreams contest. It was inspired by a patient’s dream to go to Thailand. Another inspiration was Japanese Manga-style comics. Can you tell that I dream in color?

The top panel is riding an elephant in Chiang Mai and the bottom panel is of flying kites in Sanam Luang (a park in Bangkok).

This quilt is double-sided and has a map of Thailand appliqued on the back.

The deadline for this year’s Quilt of Dreams contest has already passed, but there’s no reason why you still can’t make a dream quilt. Choose a dream of your own or of someone you love and design a special dream quilt.

Or mark your calendar for the 2010 Quilt of Dreams contest because the new Quilt of Dreams fabrics and brochure will be out early next year. Plan to make and donate a Quilt of Dreams. All quilts entered are given to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital patients or sold by auction. More than 15,000 quilts have already been donated and nearly $5 dollars raised by Quilt of Dreams over the past seven years.

Click here for more about this quilt.

Tiny doodles are not only fun to draw, they’re great for appliqué designs because when you’re drawing something very small, there’s not a lot of room for fussy details. That makes for easy appliqué. At left are several doodles I drew for appliqué blocks. You could fit all three of these drawings together on a Post-It note with room to spare.

When you’ve drawn a couple of doodles you like, just enlarge them to your desired size on the computer or a photocopy machine. I scan them at high resolution, then enlarge and clean them up in Photoshop, or sometimes use Illustrator and auto-trace them into vector artwork. Simple image-editing computer programs will do the trick as well. You don’t need the enlarged drawings to be picture perfect unless you are planning to publish the patterns.

After you’ve enlarged them to your desired size, you can print them out. If the lines are very pixelated or fuzzy from the enlarging process, use a lightbox or tape the paper to a sunny window and trace the design onto a new piece of paper.

If you are going to use paper-backed fusible web for your appliqués, remember to reverse the image in your computer program, photocopy machine, or flip it over and trace from the reverse side when you trace it onto a new sheet of paper after printing. That way the design won’t be backwards when you iron the fusible web onto your fabric.

Here are the results of the coffee cup doodles (I haven’t made any quilts from the cupcake doodle yet):

I Love You More Than … is based loosely on the small cup in the top left. I decided to simplify the cup even further by changing it to a straight-on perspective and added the stylized heart-shaped steam. The steam doodles are probably in a sketch pad or another computer someplace.

Latte is the pattern I made from the “large” coffee doodle on the right. I really like this cup and made quite a few variations of it. I seem to have forgotten about the swirly steam. I should make a block with the steaming cup. Maybe I could put the cupcake next to it.

The cup quilt on the left was probably supposed to be a cup of water. Come to think of it, that fabric reminds me of bubbles. It could be sparkling water.

The cup quilt on the right is A Cuppa Beads. Both of these cups are somewhere in my UFO hangar. I was using the cup of water as a demo piece for teaching bead embroidery so it’s not very far along, but A Cuppa Beads is probably ready for a border and quilting.

Below is a detail of the original Latte wallhanging. You will see more of this quilt in early 2010.
Happy doodling! =(^_^)=

For a little quilt-y inspiration this week, why not choose a song? Pick a favorite song to play in your studio or sewing room and see what images and ideas pop into your head.

You don’t have to write or embroider the actual song lyrics onto your quilt, in fact it’s better if you don’t. Then you won’t have to worry about copyright. Song writers have rights regarding their lyrics just as quilt designers and other visual artists do with their designs and images. Just listen to the song with a pencil and sketch pad in hand or choose a palette of colors and a traditional quilt block to go with the melody you hear.

In the end the connection to the actual song may not even be apparent to viewers unless you explain it to them, and that’s OK. Just use the song as a starting point. Let the end be a pleasant surprise.

My 2007 quilt, “It’s not easy being green” (above) was inspired by the song of that same title sung by Kermit the Frog. I went from Muppet frog to red-eyed tree frog. Although the red-eyed tree frog is not actually an endangered species, its rain forest home is shrinking at an alarming rate (National Geographic). Although it may not always be easy, there are a lot of things each one of us can do to be “green”. Check out National Geographic’s Green Guide for green ideas for everyday living.

Click here for more about my quilt, “It’s not easy being green”

Here’s a really fun doodle fabric from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital by HiFashion Fabrics, Inc. ©2002. The fabric is designed from patients’ artwork. I love this fabric’s energy and whimsy. Just looking at it makes me feel happy.

In 2004 I made a quilt, The Rainbow Maker (below), for the Hancock Fabrics/St. Jude Hospital Quilt of Dreams contest and used this fabric as the sashing in the outer borders. It won a judge’s choice award and 3 yards of fabric a month for an entire year. Click here to find out more about this quilt. Can you imagine, that was my 3rd ever blog entry! (March 2006) This post is #241.
That rainbow was what really got my stash going. (and the 36-yard fabric prize didn’t hurt either.) Every hue of the rainbow is made up of little pieces of fabric about an inch or so long each. I thought it was cheating if you used the same fabric twice, so I had to go on a real fabric hunt to get enough of each of the colors to make a whole rainbow.

After all these years I haven’t quite shaken that idea. Sometimes it’s still hard for me to use a fabric in more than one place in a single quilt.

My pigma pens and sketchbook are beckoning to me so I’ll sign off now.

=(^_^)= happy doodling!

Dear Diary 2006 is a journal quilt of sorts. That is to say, I planned to make a 3″ block every single day relating to some event of the day. At the end of the year I would have an epic quilt along the lines of Dear Jane.

Instead of 365 I ended up with 60. Designing, pulling fabric and making an entirely new block each and every day proved to be a bit more than I could handle. Even though many are traditional blocks and a few came from books and magazines, there was still the work of choosing a symbolic block and redrafting it because not very many people design 3″ blocks.

For 2009 I vowed to complete some of my UFOs and these blocks were even mostly sewn into rows already so it was an easy decision to tackle Dear Diary rather than some of my less complete projects. I’m really glad I did, because I love the way it turned out even though I only got through about 16% of the year’s blocks. I can still remember what most of the day-blocks I did finish represent. Here’s a sampling:

Shoe Shopping: Annika and I were shopping for shoes and these beaded silk shoes caught her eye. Since they were a bit impractical for kindergarten, we settled on an appliquéd quilt block to remember the shoes by.

Road to California: I chose this traditional block for the day I attended the Road to California quilt show in Ontario. The orange and green fabrics represent oranges in the citrus trees.

Taking Down the Tree: This represents the day we took down and put away the Christmas tree and ornaments. I’m pretty sure it was still January.

Snow Day: Yes it actually snowed right here in sunny Southern California. The kids (and grown-ups too) had a grand snow day, although it only lasted until about 11:00 am, when the sun came out and melted it all.

Ladybug Hunt: Annika and her friends had a wonderful time at the park one fine spring day when the grass was a veritable garden, not of flowers but of ladybugs.

Nancy Halpern wrote a great article, Quilting Day by Day, about this daily kind of journal quilt in the May 1997 issue of Threads magazine. In it she told the story of her daily quilt journal that she made in 1990.

Nancy had the foresight to set down some rules before she began. One of those rules was to finish the block by the end of the day even if it’s just to cut a single piece of fabric to represent that day. And she wrote her daily records in an actual journal, not whatever scrap of paper happened to be sitting next to her sewing machine that day.

If I had read this article and Nancy’s rules before I started, Dear Diary 2006 would probably have been a much larger quilt. But there’s always 2010 … or maybe simply summer vacation 2009 or Labor Day weekend for a trial run.

I’m hosting a “Quilt Green” challenge for my guild this year and Quilt-cycle Sampler is the sample quilt I made to give people some ideas of the different kinds of things that can be recycled into quilts: not only old clothes and linens, but broken jewelry, toys and trinkets, paper items, interesting “trash” you would normally throw away … just about anything that can be sewn or glued down really.
The fabrics on this quilt are all recycled and came from a linen shirt, plaid skirt, flannel nightshirt, two pairs of jeans shorts, two jersey T-shirts, silk skirt, polyester dress, and cotton sheets. The blocks include piecing and appliqué.

Top row embellishments: embroidery from torn kid’s clothes, plastic grass sushi garnish, souvenir keychain, metal fish charm from a tag sale brooch, printed silk motif from my former favorite skirt that eventually got shredded in the washing machine.

Middle row embellishments: my daughter’s broken baby sunglasses, plastic grocery bag “fabric”, cancelled stamps in windows made from clear vinyl packaging.

Bottom row embellishments: yo-yo flower made from thrift store dress and buttons removed from various clothing, jeans’ pocket and parts from two old bracelets, recycle logo made from painted used dryer sheets.

Bottom border and fringe: juice pouch, tie from jersey T-shirt, dimensional flower cut from jeans shorts, seed beads and vintage yellow faceted glass beads from two different necklaces, metal globe charm from an earring, and Dora the Explorer party favor from my daughter’s 2nd birthday party, with one of her birthday photos glued in the center.

The batting is recycled from an old towel, and some more old cotton sheets for the backing. These sheets were so threadbare that they ripped several times while I quilted it, so a few appliqués for the back were in order. It’s a good thing this quilt is for the wall. I would recommend you recycle your sheets before they start to shred in your hands.
Here are a few more tips in case you get inspired to create a quilt from recycled materials:

* Fusible woven interfacing will help strengthen fragile fabrics and help keep uncooperative fabrics in line.

* Beading, upholstery, and top-stitching threads work great for sewing on all kinds of embellishments.

* Consider adding a photo or two to make a memory quilt if you are using sentimental materials. You can use a printable fabric sheet, sew a clear photo sleeve onto the quilt top, or simply glue the photo to a trinket using all-purpose adhesive.