A New Year - A new Book Cover

Happy New Year! Yes I know, I'm a bit late, but I hope it is a good one for everyone, and a very creative one for all my textile friends.

I also know it has been a while since I have been here. I have still been creating though, lots of things in the "Slow Cloth Category". But more about those later.

For today, I want to show you all my quick little creation of a book cover. It is to cover yet another inspiration book. The book is to inspire my local sewing group friends that inspiration for projects can come from anywhere. Inside the book is just clippings from magazines and mainly shop catelogues, the type that get dropped in the letterbox just about on a daily basis.

The first clipping is one of a doona cover. It has bands of colour across the bottom, tucks placed in one of the bands of colour, then a print all over the remainder of the cover. I have used to the print as my inspiration.

To begin with I searched through some bags of fabric that I just sorted through and pulled out three that would go together. The green was from my stash, but the pink and the check were from scraps. Interfacing on the back, pieced together, then appliqued and machine embroidered.

The machine embroidery was the fun bit, trying to find a stitch on my machine to look like what I wanted. Then playing with the colours to get something that looked good. After experimenting, & remembering that contrast embroidery to the base fabric took time to get it to look good. I settled on two shades darker than the fabric so that the mistakes were not quite as notaceable.

Then I wanted some embroidery on the outside of one flower. Silly me did not test it, and it looked like ****. I tried to unpick and got part-way there, but it was looking messier by the minute. At the back of my mind was this little voice reminding me 'never unpick- just cover it up'. So that's what I did, just covered up the mess with a larger flower. Who can tell?

My little bud needed something, so this is where I had fun playing with one of the features of my machine. I can set a stitch pattern to stitch from 1 - 10 pattern repeats, or to contujnue forever until I stop. I programmed it to stitch just one, hence my little staymens erer born.

All in all I am happy with the end result. I am hoping it will inspire the ladies of my group to try something new.

Flutterby Dreams

Well, what can I say, it's been a while! We might just skip over all the Seasons Greetings stuff (hoping everyone had a good one) as we are way past that now, and just get on with the creativity.

I have been creating, ( those that know me well know that I create something with textiles every day !), I have just been creating things that I couldn't show here for a while. Most of what I am creating at the moment are for the new little people arriving in the family.

This quilt was created for a new little girl that arrived in the family late last year. I knew she was arriving, but it still took me by surprise when I got a phone call to say she was due "next week". That sent me in a spin, what do I do? In the same phone call I was informed of another little person arriving later this year! I might add here that this phone call was the night before I was going on holidays, how could I think? My mind was in a spin. The phone call was from the mother of the baby expected later this year, so at least I could ask her what she wanted. Mmmmm..........anything. What colour? Mmmmm...........whatever you feel. I was after inspiration,  so I had to look elsewhere for that, and I was going on holiday, no time to look through my patterns and books! For the whole trip in the car ( I was passenger) my mind was thinking, I could do this, or that, no, little fingers get caught in the holes, this would be better. What design? My books are at home! Then I remembered about the two creative shops in the little town I was going to. One of these shops is a patchwork shop, selling a great range of fabrics, patterns and general sewing stuff. My kind of store! I would just have to go for a visit to see what inspiration I could pick up there.So visit I did, and came out with a bag full of fabric that said "baby". Then it was onto the other store for more inspiration, but there will be more about that in a later post.

OK, so I had fabric, now to a design. I would worry about that when I got home (or so I thought),. I had other stitching with me to do.

While we were away the message came about L____'s arrival. A little girl! Mmmmm....... I had lots of pink fabric............... and white................ mmmmmm...........enough for a quilt? There were lots of other colours in the bag too but this was a little girl, she needed pink and white. So the paper came out,  the designing started, then the calculations. Mmmmm.......... I would just have to go back to that lovely shop to buy more pink fabric!

The quilt needed to be done as fast as possible, after all, L_______ was already here. So just quick squares were the answer, but it was looking to plain, how to jazz it up to give it some oomph! Some machine embroidery! Butterflies for a little girl! That would be good.......and quick! Well relatively, considering Christmas was around the corner. But it would all have to wait till I got home.

Upon arriving home I set out to see what butterfly designs  I already had , after all it is the digitizing process that takes all the time. I found a few, but only one I thought was anywhere near suitable. The shape was nice, but the heavy stitching wasn't, it needed to be light and delicate. So I set about changing it. I took all the heavy stitching away from the wings and inserted a filling stitch, placed at an angle to give more interest. Then I set about changing all the start and end points of each component of the design. If they are in the wrong place, the stitch out will have nasty looking jump stitches that cause problems. As any digitizer will tell you, this may sound simple but in reality takes time, then it all has to be tested to make sure it works.

The butterfly above is what I came up with.

Once the design was tested, I then had to think about how to execute it to fabric. I could cut out all my squares ready for embroidery, but they wouldn't fit in my embroidery hoop, and would need calico stitched on all four sides to make them fit. Mmmmmm........................time consuming. So then I thought about marking the squares onto the fabric, and  positioning the embroidery design in the hoop to fit within each square before the fabric was cut. Much better, less sewing, less time. So all 33 butterflies were stitched onto the fabric before it was cut.

Once the butterflies were done, the cutting and piecing were quick. Then I just had to think about the quilting and that was a no brainer. I had set the design off center to add more interest, and added the quilting lines to reflect it. Just straight line quilting, nothing fancy, pink thread on pink fabric, white thread on white fabric. Quick and easy, followed by the binding.

The quilt is now being cuddled by it's new owner, hopefully for many years to come.

Money Tree

"Money Tree" was the page I created for the book called "Nonsense". How much nonsense was this? We would all want one, but we all know that such things are complete nonsense.

I started with a hand painted background which I layered with brown satin & brown lace. A tree picture was digitized in outline only, then stitched through all layers. The brown layers were then cut back to reveal the background. $ symbols were also digitized & added to the tree, along with some leaf patterns & FME.

Not one of my better efforts but it filled the criteria.

Hexamorphis

"Hexamorphis" is the page I made for the book called "Metamorphose".

Beginning with drawing a hexagon in my drawing program, I changed it's shape just by playing with the nodes on the corners. The hexagon morphed into a star shape, and all kinds of other weird & wonderful 6 sided shapes. So these shapes became the basis of my design. Cut from hand dyed fabric, appliqued onto purple cotton, added machine stitching & all appliqued onto yellow felt.

Loopy lace Pg 10

This page is not signed and also has no notes, so am not sure who has made it. The background is hand painted card with a fancy machine pattern stitched in straight rows of orange. Another fancy stitch has been used in curves in a thicker thread which means it is probably bobbin work. An overlay of orange tissue paper covers the painted card, with just a small window to view the stitching.

I am not sure where the computer has come in, possibly in the curved rows of stitching. They could have been digitized. Still, it is a page that some nice person made for my book.

A Heart For PassionART

My first project for 2010.

The call has come out for hearts, any technique, no larger than 20cm x 20cm, embroidered on one or both sides, lightly padded for dimension & with a loop so that they can be strung.

So the above heart is my contribution. Pieced with three different fabrics, I then machine embroidered rows of hearts in red & white, layered with batting & backing, cut the heart shape, finished the edges & attached the ribbon loop.

All the completed hearts will be displayed at the PassionART Outdoor Twilight Festival on Valentines Day.

A Quick Challenge

One of the groups I belong to decided to have a challenge. We were asked to bring along a bag with some fabric, any fabric, around fat quarter size, and more than one piece if desired, complete with our name. The challenge was then to swap the bags, and we would then have to make something usefull with the bag contents we had swapped, to give back to the person who originally gave the bag. We didn't have to use it all, and we could add anything else that we wanted.

The above covered coathanger is what I made with the fabric in my swap bag. There were three pieces of fabric, one purple & two green. As the purple was the largest piece, I used it as the main fabric. Then I used one of the greens to add a piped edge. In my calculation, purple & green need to have a third colour to make it all "sing", so I added a digitized embroidery motif in green, purple & yellow to give decoration to the front.

The motif is one that I put together with parts of a couple of different designs, so making it my own. Although I was happy with how the finished motif looked, there were lots of jump stitches and the flower section was really thick with stitches. I have made notes that if I want to stitch this design again, I would be better re-digitizing it to avoid these problems.

Overall am happy with the final product, I hope the recipient is too.

"Seasons Of Change" - April TIF

" Seasons of Change" is my April TIF challenge complete. It began here & continued to this, which I wasn't entirely happy with. So I cut out my leaf & appliqued it onto a green background. I think it looks much better & has more life than before. I tried to portray the changes in colour & shapes that Mother Nature gives us as she changes the seasons. I have used digitizing, applique & machine embroidery to achieve the result.