Week 4 Weekly Art Project 2017

This week(Week 4 for me) I was inspired by a tree in my Mum and Stepfather's forest garden.

 I liked the thick trunk on the tree.

I made a sketch of the outline of the tree and freehand cut the pieces for the little quilt.

The fabric used is one of Ironbark Arts hand dyed and patterned fabric(Ali and I) and I decided to machine piece and hand stitch the work.  The piece is 9in by 12 inches.

 cheers Rebecca

Weekly Art Project 2017 Week 3

I have finished Week 3 Art Project kindly organised by Brenda Gael Smith and I again based mine on trees.  I used Ironbark Arts (Ali George and my hand dyed and hand printed art fabrics) in the piece which is again 9 inches by 12 inches and I used hand stitching.

Here is my inspiration photo taken whilst I was walking the dog around the Lake near my house.

I machine pieced the small quilt and took a more abstract approach.

Ironbark r

On to next week now.
Rebecca

2017 Finish A Long

Hi I have decided to join the 2017 Finish A Long.

My two part finished quilts are a rail fence I have cut out of a single piece of my hand dyed material.

The second is a partial quilt top I made some time ago in a Nancy Crow workshop in New Zealand.

I am rushing to get these two quilts entered I will return and try to do the blog button.

Rebecca

Weekly Art Project 2017 Week 2

Well I managed to make my Week 2 Project.  It is based on the shape of a bottlebrush tree in our front yard.

I used my hand dyed patterned fabric and free cut and machine pieced.  It took me a while to decide how to quilt the piece but in the end I decided to do free form quilting.  The size is 9 inches by 12inches.

I am writing in my sketchbook my learnings from this Project. One point I have made so far is that the size is probably a little big to maintain on a weekly basis and I will review this aspect after Week 4.

cheers

Rebecca

Weekly Art Project Week One

Brenda Gael Smith has been undertaking a Weekly Art Project for about 16 weeks and she has been encouraging others to join in.  I have decided to join and make a mini quilt each week.  I am planning 9in by 12 inches. In thinking about my first piece I took a photo last week and posted on Instagram (I post as #oceanbluetextiles7)of a very large paperbark tree at the end of my street.

I also put up on my design wall a quilt top that I made in a Nancy Crow Workshop in New Zealand a few years ago and the technique I used also inspired me.

So I went to look in my hand dye scrap pieces (smaller than a quarter yard) and found a green fabric I had dyed and patterned and I also found some rust fabric I had done.  I then worked on my piece with a minimal drawing to guide me.  I am trying to use my sketchbook more!  I used valdani 12 ply to hand quilt the piece. I decided to bind the mini quilt this time but may become adventurous in the future and follow Brenda's tutorial on attaching to an art piece to a canvas.  So here is my first Challenge Piece.

Now to get busy on next week's piece!

Rebecca

Block Printing Paper

I had fun making block printed wrapping paper for Christmas.  I followed the blog post of Laura Kemshall on DesignMatters TV.  I learnt that there is acrylic paint and acrylic paint  - a medium thickness paint seemed to work most easily.  I have done some block printing before but this was really enjoyable so I am planning to continue with this printing technique.  Here is an example of the paper I made.

cheers Rebecca