Sewing Again!

Since my last post, I actually started two new sewing projects, one of which is completely finished!  We have a window seat in the lower level of the house which looks out on the deck, backyard, and lake.  We've never bothered to get a cushion for it, but recently my daughter suggested it.  I remembered that I bought that cool burlap print last spring, and I loved the way it looked with the pale green and yellow walls we have downstairs, so I decided to use that for a seat cover.  I measured everything out and took a trip to JoAnn's Fabrics for all the supplies.   Even with my coupons, it was a bit pricey (that cushion foam is expensive!) but I like the finished look.  So do the cats! (and the girls, who can now sit there and look out the window and daydream, or watch the birds).  It's a cozy spot, especially in the morning when the sun comes through.

While I was at JoAnn's, I also picked up these fabrics, below.  Even though our Fiber Fall chains were exhibited at the NSQG show in early May, we have the opportunity to exhibit these three or four other places in the next year, so I thought it would be worth completing all the elements.  The last chain would be "fire," hence the shiny orange, red, and yellow choices.

I decided to make a new fabric out of these three, and to use the burnt orange sheer with the sequins as the outside portions of a sandwich.  Inside the sandwich, I layered wavy strips of the other two fabrics, plus a sheer red paper-like material that was wrapped around my Valentine's Day flowers.  I used a fusible webbing between the layers to hold everything together, pressed it, and then stitched with black thread in wavy lines.  Here's what the fabric looks like now:

And here's a close-up:

Certainly looks like fire, right?  And it's still pretty sheer, to suggest flames even more.  I still want to do some more stitching with orange thread.  Then I plan to cut it up into asymmetric triangles to resemble flames.  I'm hoping it will have a real flame-like effect with all the triangles strung and spinning as they hang.  I hope I can have some of the triangles cut up and strung by our next FANE meeting this Thursday evening.

Our next FANE challenge (due in August) is to create a flat fiber art building that is 12-18" wide and 36" tall or taller.  The roofline can be whatever shape we choose to give our building character.  I already have an idea of what I'd like to create so I've started collecting materials.  Here they are, below:

Can you tell what these are and guess what type of building I want to make?  I hope I can pull it off....

Stay tuned to find out!

How Do I Begin...

...to catch up on the last six weeks?   It's hard to believe that much time has passed since my last blog post!  I haven't been sick or away on an extended vacation - just trying to juggle it all and getting a little lax about posting (okay, maybe a lot lax!).  So I'll try to catch up as succinctly as possible.

 I'll start with the "Lace" show that was in the gallery for the month of April at the Mahopac Public Library.  Three of my FANE friends participated in the show, as did I.  I only took a couple of shots of the pieces, but here they are.  In this one, you can see two of the three pieces that Gail Ellspermann submitted, the blue lacy one on the left and the one on the left in the group of three.  I wish I had taken some close-ups, as her work is visually very interesting and detailed, made up of a variety of materials and colors.  

Below is my piece which I ended up calling "East-facing window:  February morning."  I was trying to capture those winter mornings from my childhood when the window would be decorated with frost crystals and the beams of sunlight streaming through produced sparkles and a pale rainbow of colors.

At the end of the month, FANE displayed our collection of Fiberfall pieces at the NSQG's annual quilt extravaganza.  I wasn't able to get over to Western Connecticut State Univ. to see the show this year (I worked that Saturday and had other obligations on Sunday) but Norma Schlager took some fabulous photos that she posted on her blog.  Please visit by clicking here to see the dramatic impact of our group display.

Since the fall, FANE members have been researching and sharing bios of modern artists at our monthly meetings to help us expand our horizons, gain some insight and maybe even some inspiration.  I was assigned Josef Albers and at the May meeting, I took an easy approach by reading the children's picture biography about him titled An Eye for Color by Natasha Wing.   Josef studied how our perception of a color may change depending on what other colors surround it.  He published a book about his findings titled Interaction of Color in 1963.    Using the example shown below on the cover of his book, the small tan square is the exact same shade of tan, but it looks different on the aqua background on the top than it does on the orange background below.  Josef also noted how dark colors tend to recede while lighter ones tend to come forward.

As part of our study, we could create something in the style of the artist, so I made this group of squares below.  Josef Albers worked almost exclusively with squares and rectangles and paint straight out of the tube.  I tried to keep things simple and fun by placing orange polka-dot squares on four different fabrics.  As fiber artists and quilters, we have the added dimension of fabric prints and texture.  Do the orange squares look different on the different backgrounds?  Which do you prefer?

 Another thing that has kept me busy this month has been the garden.  Now that the weather is better, I like to get outside as much as possible.  We took down a large oak tree in the backyard to let more light in, and now we have a lot of wood and branches to remove!  The people we hired to take the tree down piled everything very neatly, but right where my ferns will be growing, at the bottom of the new stone steps.  You can see the many logs piled up along the property line in the background - some of those are about 2 feet in diameter - it was a BIG tree!  They need to be split before they can even be moved.  Someone will be very busy for the next few weekends....

It's very exciting to see things turning green, blooming, spreading, and growing.  Last year I only had a few tiny blossoms on this forget-me-not, but this year it looks full and healthy.  Yay!  I also moved some of my large irises from the front of the house down here around the pond.  I hope they do well here.

And the fairy garden is looking good too!  The Irish moss, sweet woodruff, wild violets and other low-growing things are all spreading around and filling in.  It's beginning to look truly enchanted!

Cassie certainly enjoys hanging out in the garden with me while I putter around.  It's a very pleasant and peaceful place to be.

And although we removed a perfectly healthy tree and we have a huge amount of wood to move, it has opened up a nice big piece of sky above the garden.  I'm looking forward to seeing everything thrive now that the plants will be getting a better dose of afternoon sunshine!

Finally, I've been busy doing some spring cleaning and organizing.   This area under our stairs was originally a small mud room, when the girls were little and we parked the car in the garage and came and went through that door.  Then, it became our rabbit habitat for about a year.  When we could no longer tolerate the mess (and the smell!) we moved the rabbits outside and reclaimed this space.  We hung coats here but never bothered putting in a shoe rack or shelves.

Well, I finally took the time to pick up a couple of shoe shelves at Bed Bath and Beyond.  They were easy to put together, hold a ton of shoes, and can be moved easily if my DH needs to get back there to change the water filter.  What a huge improvement!  Why didn't I do this sooner?  Now I just have to pack up those winter coats....

Hope you've been busy enjoying life in the spring!  Leave me a comment and let me know what you've been up to!

Emerging

It's hard to believe April is here already!  Where did the month of March go?  I was a bit under the weather the entire month, coming down with the flu early in the month, then fighting that lingering cough, which eventually became pneumonia last week.  I'm finally getting my energy back and have caught up on most everything around the house (with the help of all my wonderful family) so now it's time to catch up on the blog!

Even though I was not very energetic last month, I did manage to finish my final "Fiber Fall" chain, this one with the Earth theme.  A portion of it is laid out on my worktable below.

Something put it into my head that I should add a little hand stitching to these, so before I strung them together, I added some detail with pearl cotton.  I didn't embellish every rectangle, but I did do quite a few.  It added a little more textural interest and kept my hands busy while I was on the mend.  These will be hanging in the NSQG spring show early next month, along with all the others made by my fellow FANErs.  I'm excited to see them all hanging together.

Of course, another great thing to do when you're lying in bed not feeling well is READ and I certainly did my share of that last month!  Some of my favorites were The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown (a fabulous non-fiction choice), The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (a mystery by J.K. Rowling under a pseudonym), The Magician's Lie by Greer Macallister, Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen, and The Hired Girl, a fabulous YA novel by Laura Amy Schlitz.  I also read Where'd you go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple for the Light Bite book club that I lead at the Mahopac Library, and I just started The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald.  So I kept busy while I was resting!

And now spring is here and I'm anxious to get outside in the garden again.  We've had a few mild days here and there and I was so thrilled to see snowdrops, crocuses, and these little purple star-shaped flowers.  I transplanted them all last spring and it was lovely seeing my efforts yield some beautiful blooms!  These little purple things (don't remember what they are- will have to look them up) are all over the front lawn and I hope will spread as much down in the back.

As happy as I was to see things emerging and growing, I also see lots of things that need work.  We had a couple of days of heavy rain in February and March that resulted in lots of silt washing over the pebble path as you can see below.  I'll have to see if I can clean it up a bit one of these days.

Also we've had a shade problem in our backyard almost since we moved in, and that was twenty years ago!  There are so many tall trees we could take down to give the area more light, but it's outrageously expensive, as well as disruptive to the lawn and garden.  I've singled out this one very large oak that would give us the most bang for our buck and that will probably be coming down sometime this month, before it leafs out.  I'm looking forward to getting some much-needed light back there (but heaven knows how we'll deal with all the branches.  We have neighbors that will take the larger pieces to burn as firewood but the tree guy said the piles of branches will fill the yard if we don't chip them!).

In addition to that, I want to finally finish the stone steps we started last year.  We've been scrounging the yard for large flat stones that will work as steps and have finally located another 3 or 4 that should bring us up to the top.  That'll be nice to have done!

So we've certainly got our work cut out for us as far as the yard and garden go... I think I could keep a full-time gardener quite busy!  But after the weekend, the weather here is supposed to get chilly again, so I'll refocus on interior things a bit longer.

Onward to "Earth"

One of the big challenges of these "Fiber Fall" chains has been to create pieces that won't flop over as they hang.  The other big challenge is how to do these kind of quickly, in batches, rather than creating each shape individually.  I thought I might use paper for the backing of the earth-themed chain, but didn't find anything in my stash that really appealed to me.  I even considered printing photos on cardstock, but decided against that.  I thought about using copper wire mesh, which would look really cool on the back, but I didn't have enough in my stash and I wasn't sure I wanted to invest a somewhat pricey commodity for the back of this piece. 

So I found this white fabric mesh, above, which I've used in many winter pieces, and painted a sizable piece with copper metallic acrylic paint.  It imparts a nice sheen as well as stiffening the fabric.  So that's what will be on the back - on to the front!

Luckily, I have quite an array of textured brown fabrics in my stash (not sure why).  Many of them are upholstery samples that have stiff paper glued to the back, other ones were given to me by my sister-in-law, leftovers from her home decorating business.  I also had a lot of nice brown cotton prints.

I even came across this interesting stretch fabric.  It is dyed in mottled shades of brown, tan, and aqua blue and is stitched with a brick sort of pattern and these pom-pom like embellishments.  I have NO idea what anyone would use it for (it wouldn't be good for clothing or home decor) , but I picked it up to use as the ocean floor in some under-the-sea pieces.

So I cut up all the different fabrics in long wavy strips, overlapped them, and stitched them together with the top edge raw.  I really like the way they look all together, like sedimentary layers of the earth.

The underside is kind of ugly, though, and all that white stiff paper will show through the mesh I painted.  What to do?

 I went through my stash again and came up with a large upholstery sample among the stuff from my sister-in-law.  The brown side is really the right side, but I decided to layer the pieces with this fabric as the batting and the wrong side towards the mesh.

I'm really liking the way all the fabrics interact with each other!  Now I have to add some stitching ( I may even add a little hand stitching) and cut this up into rectangles, then link them all together.  Almost done with #3!

On a Roll...

I started thinking about my next Fiber Fall chain before I even finished the last one, so I was able to keep the momentum going and dive right in.  I made a sandwich similar to the one I made for the last chain, but this time I used a teal netting as the outside pieces and fusible webbing to hold everything together while I stitched.  I already had many wavy strips cut out of sheer and sparkly fabrics in this bright aqua blue left over from a previous project, so the process went pretty quickly.  Above is the resulting conglomerate fabric (for lack of a better word), which I cut into strips 1 1/2" wide.  I decided to use rectangle shapes this time, but still cut them into 3", 4" and 5" strips.  I linked them together in a similar fashion (3, 4, 5, 4, 3 etc) but this time I added an aqua glass bead between the shapes.  Here's how it looks so far:

Again, I'm trying to bring to mind the element water, and the color, shine, and sparkle of the fabrics definitely do that.  I think the graduated rectangles also bring to mind waves, and the way they twirl in the slightest breeze is reminiscent of the constant motion of the ocean.  It's very glittery and pretty, like the Caribbean, and looks different enough from the "Air" chain that it's obvious what they are.  I'm not quite finished linking them all together (threading them on the yarn and tying the knots is a bit tedious) but I'm glad it came together so quickly!  I'm even contemplating making a fourth one to round out the four elements, which would be Fire.  We'll see how much energy (and time) I have after the next two...

First One Done!

My first chain for FANE's Fiber Fall exhibit is finally finished!  Even though I only had two more 5" squares to make, I had a hard time coming up with a combination of fabrics that I liked.   I played around with a lot of different ideas, including incorporating a pinwheel block somehow.  I'm not very experienced with traditional piecing techniques but I found a great tutorial for a shortcut way to make them by the Missouri Star Quilt Company on YouTube (see it here).  I actually made a few in different sizes as you see below, but I still wasn't thrilled with it.  I just wasn't sure that it belonged with the other more improvisational-type raw-edge applique` squares I already made.

I was starting to get impatient about how long these two measly squares were taking me!  I kept going through my stash and going through my stash until I finally came up with this combination:

There was enough texture, contrast, sparkle, and visual interest to make a nice looking square.  Here's the result below:

 I chained them by size: 3", 4", 5", 4", 3", 4", 5" etc so there are only the three 5-inch squares but lots of 3- and 4-inch ones.  Even so, I had a lot leftover of the materials I created for them.  I'm sure I'll find another use for them sometime...  

I'm really liking the way the chain hangs and twirls in the air.  I'm glad I hung them on the diagonal. And I'm happy to be using up my stash!  A few years ago, my sister gave me a nice portion of the fabric stash of a relative of her husband's who passed away suddenly.  I promised myself I would make every effort to use up my stash before I kick the bucket, and I've kept that in mind even as I browse the aisles at JoAnn's Fabrics  ("Use what you have, use what you have...").  I've already got some ideas for the next chain that I'll create with the theme of "water" in mind.  I have tons of water-like fabrics, so it'll be another way to help use up more of my stash!