Field Trips in Fiber - Adventures in quilting, hand dyed fabric and fiber art.

Monoprint postcards

A few weeks ago Estelle and I got together for another of our TED (technique exploration day) days. This time we tried monoprinting. Unfortunately I don't have any photos of what we did but I'll get some when we get together later this month to do more.

Given my dislike for gelatin printing you would thing that I would not care for monoprinting on glass. But I really liked it/ With glass you can get the texture of the brush and that's just enough for me. This time I just focused on playing with technique. One thing I did was paint on the glass and then remove some of the paint with foam stamps. It took a lot of tries to get some good images but it finally worked and I made these postcards with my test pieces.

I stitched wiht Superior Threads Razzle Dazzle in the bobbin and added some crystal highlights. I think they turned out pretty cute.

A birthday postcard

Today is my nephew's birthday and I needed a masculine birthday card for him and a few other male family members with upcoming birthdays.

I decided on something patriotic. It started with the linen ribbons/tapes. I think they are from Japan and I picked up 2 bundles of them when I visited the V&A last September. I wove them into a fabric big enough for 6 cards. To weave them I pinned some long horizontal strips on my pressing board and then wove in the shorter strips. I wove them pretty tightly so that there were no holes. Because these are woven tapes (no wrong side) I could apply my Mistyfuse to the top while the whole thing was still pinned to the pressing board. The Mistyfuse held it together until I could flip it over and fuse it to a piece of Timtex.

Several months ago I had created some screens of birthday and holiday messages and used one of them to screen print the birthday message onto white linen tape. To stabilize the whilte linen I ironed the strips to a sheet of freezer paper and the screened the image. It worked great.

The stars had Mistyfuse applied to the fabric first and then I cut out the star. I fused the star in place and tucked par of the message under a star point. Then I stitched around the star with a zig zag stitch and the tape with a straight stitch.

The card is finished off with a serged edge, using Wooly Nylon thread and I added gold dots with metallic gold dimensional paint.

It sounds like a long process but I made 6 of these in less than 2 hours. You can see all of my fabric postcards in my postcard Flickr gallery.

Coming Home Fabric Palette Projects

I am ending the Coming Home series with a lot of projects! If you are interested in the Coming Home fabrics you can find all of the information here.

A few weeks ago I made the Coming Home quilt . Between the quilt fabrics and the sample fat quarters that I made for the palette, I had lots left over.  I started with the same pattern as I used for the Color Palette placemats and made this set. I really like the gradient as the feature fabric. All of those different patches came from the one gradient. 

I also wrote up instructions for making these placemats and you can get it here.

Next I got out the Go! Cutter. I love this tool for taming scraps. Because I had lots of leftover fabric and because these are sufficiently manly fabrics I decided to try to cut out enough fabrics to make a Verteran's quilt.

There were lots of pieced strips so I cut tumbers from those and from the fat quarters. I was still short some tumblers so I peiced enough bits to cut 20 more tumblers. I have enough here for a 48 x 60 quilt and will use these strips (leftover from the quilt) for binding. I think that the pieced tumblers will make the quilt even more interesting. I will work on this at the next Guild Sewing Saturday.

With the rest of the scraps I cut out lots of other shapes trying to get the biggest shape possible from each scrap. I have a bin where I keep these. When I get enough of a shape I will create an ultimate scrap quilt.

Now you know that I am haunted by little bits of fabric. I just can't let them go! These cards were made from the trimmed raw edges.

I wove the background and stitched it directly to the card and then fused on 2 circles. The top one was first stamped with the gold leaf motif.

I had a little more time in the day so why not try some postcards! Some crazy peicing, a little stamping and some programmed stitces and now my February birthday cards are all taken care of.

I put these in the garbage can before I could change my mind and keep them. Chris has alread taken them to the dump and I miss them. I really must get some therapy for this.

I really enjoyed working with this palette but I'm very excited about the new one that I will introduce February 5th!

Coming Home Fabric Palette Projects

This week I played with only 2 blocks to see how many designs I could come up with. Here are a few of them.  The blocks are Ohio Star and Grecian Square. I think I got a little crazy with it but I had fun anyway. 

If you are interested in the Coming Home fabric, you can get the details here.

Then I did a couple of layouts with jsut the Ohio Star block.

A Journal and a postcard #2

This is my December 9 journal quilt and also 

a Christmas card design. 

I never do just one Christmas postcard design. I usually do 3 but this year, only 2. This Cardinal is totally unoriginal. It is an adapted version of the Wee Folk Art Cardinal Applique Block. I saw it on someone else's blog and I thought it was so cute that I just had to use it too. I used all hand dyed fabric on this one.

I made 15 of these!