Stitched Surface

In my last post, I mentioned that I could envision doing a lot of embroidery on the surface of the quilt. I was thinking about that and decided to post this quilt, because this is the first quilt I made where I experimented with densely stitching the top. I made this piece as a commission and initially was just going to piece and machine quilt it. At the time, I was learning a lot of embroidery stitches, mostly from Erica Wilson's fabulous book, Erica Wilson's Embroidery. This book dates back to the seventies and isn't exactly eye candy, but it is chock full of stitches and the instructions are very clear. Anyway, I used this quilt top as a sampler of sorts. Piecing the top only took me a couple of weeks, but all the embroidery ended up taking several months. I loved it though; both the finished product and the process. I found the stitching even more relaxing and meditative than knitting. And it too was extremely portable. I can't imagine doing that amount of stitching on most quilts I make because it is so time consuming, but I really enjoyed exploring this technique and am really looking forward to doing some more.

More WIP

This is a first stage picture of a small quilt I'm making for a friend. Like I mentioned before, I feel pulled in two directions when I make pieces for friends or family. On the one hand, I derive so much pleasure from seeing them enjoy and use the things I make for them, but...I know I should focus on making work to sell or for shows. Even worse, my interests don't end with dyeing fabric and making quilts. I LOVE knitting and embroidery. I would dearly love to learn to spin and dye wool. Also, I'd love to be more proficient at designing both knitted and sewn garments. And, just to top it all off, I'm so enjoying blogging, that I actually heard myself utter the words," Man, I'd love to learn html."
I'm pretty good about reining myself in, but that doesn't completely keep me from having a few too many projects going at the same time. My only saving grace is that I usually sense at some point that I'm over committed and I tell myself that I can't start anything new until I finish the work I've already started. And, in all honesty, I usually do finish my projects...eventually.

Here's the piece a little further along. I overdyed some commercial fabric using a shibori technique called itajime. I like using it to create dyed blocks that mimic a pieced look. I've also included some fabric that I dyed using another shibori method, arashi, and a fair amount of my batiked fabric as well. I'd get a real kick out of adding a bunch of embroidery to the surface once I've finished the piecing.

Progress Report

After whining about how I shouldn't post about work in progress, I've decided to do it anyway. Maybe because I'm pretty happy about the way these pieces are going, I feel OK about discussing these images. Also, I want to use this blog as a journal so I should be comfortable putting up work that's not finished or completely worked out.
This isn't even the most recent stage, but I had the picture, so I thought I'd go ahead and put it up. The more I work on this quilt, the bigger I think I want the final piece to be. In fact I'm thinking of making it full/queen size so that we can actually use it. This, of course, is my constant problem. The conflict between things I want to make for myself/family/friends and the fact that I know I have to focus on making pieces for shows, etc.
Here's where it's at today. The background fabric was originally made by dyeing pima cotton lemon/lime, patterning with wax to create the stripes and then overdyeing in chartreuse. As I worked on the quilt, I realized that I didn't have any more lemon/lime to dye more fabric. I dyed lemon yellow instead and then overdyed it in chartreuse. This background fabric is a little warmer than the previous fabric. To deal with this difference, I ripped a few seams and dispersed the old and new background fabric. That way there''s a balance between the two fabrics.

Resolved

So I resolved that this year I would document everything I make. That's never been a problem(well, almost never) with my quilts because I've been good about taking slides or digital images of them. The same can not be said about other stuff I've made. A lot of these things are made as gifts, usually finished at the last minute, and photographing them is really an afterthought. Well, it's a new year and I love New Year's resolutions. I also love the idea of being able to look back at the end of this year and feel good about my output. So, here are the things I've made so far this year:
I made these leg warmers for myself. We don't have an abundance of days here in Austin where leg warmers can make a huge difference in how you feel, but these were the first things I've made myself in a long time and I'm happy to have them.OK. Apparently, I've been feeling pretty neglected because the leg warmers didn't quite assuage the feeling that I wanted to make stuff for myself, so I knit these socks as well. I used some Regia self-striping yarn I've had for what seems like forever, but, I'm so enjoying wearing these socks.I made this sham for Sarah. It matches the quilt I made her a couple of years ago. She's been asking me for a matching sham for a quite a while now, so she's pretty happy that I finally finished this. I was hoping it would inspire her to keep her room neater, but so far it doesn't seem to have done the trick.

Spools

I keep stuff. I don't think it's an excessive amount of stuff, but others may differ. Anyway, I've got a "collection" of spools. Now, it's not a collection of antique, wooden spools. No, nothing that interesting. Rather, it's just a mass of spools that once were full of thread and now all the thread has been used. To make it even less exciting and adventurous, I didn't collect these spools off the table of America's most innovative and creative fiber artists, they're just left over from my own projects. Pretty underwhelming. But, for some reason, I think the baskets of empty spools are beautiful and I've been wondering for awhile what I wanted to make out of those spools. OK, I don't have that answered yet, but I did decide to play around with arranging them and taking pictures of those arrangements.

This is why I should never talk about work in progress

Why? Because I always change my mind. I woke up this morning, looked at what was on my design wall, and just didn't like it. Mostly it felt like I'd done that before and there wasn't any excitement in the investigation. I also didn't like what was happening in the spaces between the pieced squares. The space was too congested and confusing. I've really been striving to work with words such as clean, fresh, designed running through my head. All I was seeing was cluttered. So, I separated the blocks and laid them on some uncut striped batik. I have two widths of stripes and I wanted to see how crucial it was for the width of the stripes in the blocks to be the same as the width of the background stripes.This is basically the same image, but with a lot more of the wider fabric included. I decided it was important that the width inside the square and in the background to be the same.
Here's the image a little further along and maybe even pieced some. True to form, I need to dye more of the background fabric before I can move along. Even worse, I have to dye white to lemon/lime(don't have that right now, would have to order from Dharma ) or could dye base color of lemon yellow, batik stripes, then over dye chartreuse.

Work in Progress

I've been batiking a lot of striped fabric lately with the idea of making some quilts based on some of the studies did last December. I posted one of those images here as well as the pillows I made with striped fabric. I've started a couple of pieces tonight and thought I'd go ahead and add them to my blog.