Child's Play

This is Hilary's quilt. She says, "I have tried to give the impression of a child's painting in a colouring book.The figures are machine stitched."

PLAYTIME

This work resulted from many manifestations.  I am addicted to the design possibilities of text at the moment and words provided the starting point.  Several ideas came and went out of the window until I thought of children's play blocks.  These were a devil to construct and there were to be five originally with 2 letters on each to say 'CHILD'S PLAY'.  However, when I started assembling the first blocks I thought that I had a pleasing design so it got no further than 'CHILDS'.

The background was from a manipulation of the words 'Child's Play' together with the idea that it could be taken in the adult or child sense e.g it can mean a doddle, easy, a picnic, a walk in the park.  Most of this is designed not be read.  A quotation from Chaucer's 'The Merchant's Tale' is included also.

Techniques include digital transfer and free machine quilting on cotton.

Filling in the Blancs

Well, my piece is finally finished. Sorry it is so late. The quilt is slightly distorted in this photos since I still haven't stitched the back facings - they are pinned in place.

I took the theme quite literally and looked for words and phrases using "blanc". I came up with blancmange, Sauvignon Blanc and, of course, Mont Blanc. The mountain has a tunnel running through it so looked at photos of the entrance from the French side. This has a strange canopy which I have shown. Funnily enough, in my searches I came across a wine shop called "Filling in the Blancs". Hence the addition of the wine bottle and glasses.

A mixture of cottons and sheer fabrics appliquéd together. Free machine embroidery.

Filling in the blancs

I took this theme literally as you can see :-). Fill in the blancs and you get a text. I trust you can find it.

Fabric used are - as usually my own hand dyed ones. Whenever a theme is announced within a couple of days I know what I want to do with it. But than other things require my attention and before I know it the end of the month is almost there and I still have to start. This month was no different than other ones. And if you are wondering why you can not see the edges of the quilt. Well, I still have to do the facing :-)).

Filling the blancs - Irene MacWilliam - May theme

I got a notion I wanted to do something with a lot of yellow, then the question was what to do on the surface of my yellow fabric. I decided to again do something abstract using off-cuts. I had fun and am well pleased with having produced a very cheerful piece. I have to add yellow is my favourite colour.

I had this piece sitting on top of my sewing table as it cheered me up looking at it, BUT a robin got shut in our kitchen which has access to my sewing room and my piece ended up with a bird dropping, which I tried to remove. I can still see where it is/was and am wondering whether to fill in the area with an extra little red dot. -- that would end up with me filling a blank area, albeit with something very small. The arrow in the next image shows where the bird splat was.

First in Flight

I'm mega behind in contributing to the monthly challenges, but did complete the April challenge.  We were on vacation for February and part of March, and it took me awhile to get back into the art studio.

This is my first attempt at creating an original tesselation.  I purchased a new program from TesselManiac and turned the kite shape into a hummingbird.

I traced the repeat pattern on tissue paper to create this piece and then painted each bird with various inks and pencils.  The inks were mixed with clear Aloe Gel, and the Inktense pencil colors were blended with water.

They looked a bit like blobs, so I used a Sharpie marker to add eyes, and baby wings to each bird, and quilted around them.

The purple First in Flight hummingbird is stitched with 2 different Madeira metallic threads.

The sky was painted with 4 different shades of ink and Aloe Gel, and machine quilted with a variegated Madeira rayon thread.

Diane