The Sage, Gateshead Quays

Well I finally made it but only just in time!  This is The Sage in Gateshead Quays and I took the photo which it represents when we went to Durham to see our grandson graduate in Durham Cathedral. I'm trying to be more adventurous by using fabrics not normally in my stash.  I bonded strips of silks onto Steam-a-seam 2 lite and laid them onto fabrics representing sky, grass and the river Tyne.  The whole of the building was covered with polyester mesh and then all stitched down while the rest was free machine quilted.

August theme

The theme for the coming month is fitting for the temperatures we are having here: Life at the Beach. My studio is on the top floor of my house with a flat roof. Can you imagine the temperature in there at the moment? With the heatwave we are having, I would rather spend some time at the beach :-).
Good luck to you all.

Out of the Mists of Time

This piece is completely different to anything I have done before. I took some horrible cheap and coarse polyester and completely covered it in grey acrylic paint before using fabric paints and acrylics with stencils that I had made when playing with the theme of Cornish Tin Mines.

I quite like the effect but wonder does it lack a focal point, or is this me just missing my usual strong colours. I felt the title fitted a rather sombre looking piece.

This is my architecture quilt.  A few years ago I was in Zaragoza and photographed tiles on a building.  I always meant to do something with the idea!  Some white cotton was dyed with Setacolour transparent and the colours were just what I wanted for the tiles. Rather than iron for 3 minutes I put the fabric in a plastic bag in the microwave for 3 minutes.  It worked!   No dye came out after washing.........so 'Zaragoza Tiles' came about.
Margaret

Architecture - City Sunset

City Sunset

This is Hilary's piece for the Architecture theme. It is called "City Sunset", starting life as a photo of the Liverpool skyline. The colours are inspired by the paintings of Ton Schulten.

Lighthouse

 

I combined this theme with a lesson I had to make for one of Katie PM's classes. My starting point was a picture of a lighthouse:

On a piece of paper I copied the outlines and drew a grid over it. This resulted in a picture with a lot of lines :-)) which I had enlarged to the size of 12"x12". This enlargement I copied onto transparent paper and gave every piece a number. And more drawing was to come. The next drawing was onto paper backed stabilizer. Much more preparation than I normally have when I make a quilt. Now at last it was time to start playing with fabric.

As you can see from the next picture I used lots and lots of different fabric. Only a few pieces in the sky are the same but that is mainly because I am running low on blue fabric. When all the tiny pieces were pinned where I wanted them, I could iron everything down. The quilting I kept simple as there was already so much going on in this quilt. Here is the finished result: