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

Waste products....or more placemats!

It all started with the tumbler blocks that I talked about Monday.  They are cut from strips of fabric that range from 5" to about 7" wide. That left a lot of 1 - 3" strips left over. You know I can't let that  fabric go to waste! Placemats are always my first idea and I thought I'd share with you my lazy design process for placemats.

My placemats are usually about 15 - 17" x 12-13" and the size varies based on what I'm using or how I want them finished. In this case I knew I wanted to use my easiest method of wrapping the front fabric to the back and topstitching with a twin needle to finish them.

I decided on 16" x 13" and cut the backing and flannel (I use old flannel sheets for the batting) to exactly that size. Then I cut up my scraps. I cut as may strips as possible approzimately 15" long and left the rest as long as possible. I separated the blue ones in one stack and the gold and green ones into another stack. I didn't know exactly waht I was going to make but I started with foundation peicing the strips simply because it's easy and fast.

I used the widest strip on the edge where I needed at least 1/2" to hang over the edge. I started foundation piecing the strips to the base (flannel and backing). There's at least 1/2" hanging over the edges of the base all the way around. At this point I still don't have an idea of what I'm doing but I decided that I needed a few strips of gold/green.

I finished it off with a wide strip of blue. At this point I stopped to ponder. I considered leaving it as it is or doing some free motion stitching. I thought a leaf vine might be cool but I wasn't sure that a stitched vine would show up well enough against this heavily textured fabric.

But an applique leaf vine would work great! I put some Mistyfuse on the back of a chunk of hand dyed fabric and cut out leaves and vines free hand. I did some free motion stitching around all of the edges and added veins to the leaves. I know these will ravel a bit around the edges when I wash them but I think that will look just fine. I finished them off by ironing the raw edges to the back and topstitching. A twin needle would work but I set up the cover stitch in my serger and finished these really quickly.

You can see that I made 2 of the placemants with horizontal strips on the left side and 2 with vertical. That's because I didn't have enough long strips to do them all vertical. I like them all!

I still have all of these fabulous scraps! What should I do with them?

Virginia Creeper is for Lovers...

....or something like that. After I finished Anne's projects, that I posted about yesterday, I still had some of the Virginia Creeper fabrics left and wanted to use them before I retire this fabric palette this weekend. (If you would like some of these fabrics you can order them through Friday.

Anyway, what I had left were primarily the reds, pinks and the spiral. I decided to make more placemats (big surprise) and why not make some Valentine's Day placemats. Now, people who know me will be laughing themselves silly right now. I'm not into hearts, Valentine's Day or pink. I really dislike pink but I challenged myself to make a placemat design using the pink Rose Quartz fabric that I would actually use.

This I can live with. The pink in this palette isn't one of the sweet pinks so that helps. But what I love is the addition of the gray. I might have made the dark red sashing wider but I limited myself to the fabric I had available and I used every bit on these projects. 

I applied fusible web to the back of the Bordeaux, Dark Cardinal and Rose Quartz fabrics and cut the hearts with my Accuquilt Go! cutter with the hearts die.  Then I did a simple free-motion outline stitch on each heart so that the placemats would wear well through the wash.

One of the things I worried about with the Go! cutter was wasted fabric. You can see here that by paying attention to fabric placement that waste is minimal.

Of course I had lots of extra hearts so I made some coasters using the Cobblestone fabrics as a base. The bubblegum pink napkins are from the napkin stash that Cindy provides me. She must have picked up 20 of these pink napkins! I used 4 of them for this set and they are improved  with the applique. I have an idea in the back of my mind for a use for some of the others.

It's barely in the category of acceptable pink levels but "barely" is good enough and I will use these next month.

Here's the whole set. You can see that the heart arrangement on the placemats is random and different on each one. Maybe I will come up with something for St. Patrick's Day next.

Gifts for Anne

I know it's well past Christmas but Anne and I celebrate our birthdays and Christmas "whenever". As in whenever we have our stuff together. This date is even more fluid when handmade gifts are involved! I finally finished her gifts last week.

Anne loves anything with a skull motif. All of her gifts last year had skull motifs and I thought I was done with skulls until I saw Lynn K's Skully Flowers and pile-o-skullies thermofax screens. I had so much fun using her sunflower screen on these projects, that I decided to have another skull Christmas for Anne. She loved the notebook cover that I did with the sunflower but she wanted a large notebook cover with the pockets for her Blackberry and some pens.

This is what I came up with. Some of the fabric pieces were  screen printed with ink and  some with with Decolourant.  All of the fabrics are from the current palette, Virginia Creeper. I use my Droid to size the pocket and place the Velcro for the closure. I used Susan Cleveland's Piping Hot Binding tool for the red piping.

Here's the back view. Yes, the skull is a little off center. I generally don't spend a lot of time planning these projects. First I did the screen printing and screen discharging and then just started putting the book together. That's just where that skull was positioned on the fabric. I like for these book covers to be a little serendipitous. Can you see how the fabric on the opening edge is screen with gray skulls on the gray fabric? I really liked that effect. I used the same gray ink on all of the painted fabrics.

Of course, there were scraps left over and I had to use them!

So she also gets some notecards and a Droid case. I screen printed some little skulls on the cards and then fused on some fabric scraps. They were kind of "meh" at that point so I started looking through my trims and found these fusible daisies to finish them off.  

She can store her work Blackberry in the notebook but she also has a Droid for her personal email and I promised to make her a Droid case months ago. It turns out that I was waiting for just the right fabric! I discharged a small piece of black with the little skulls and I used my tutorial to make the case. But the best part is the back.

I had also discharged one of the large skull images and it was perfect for the back. It makes me smile every time I see it! I line my Droid cases with eyeglass cleaner cloth so that the screen is kept clean.