This week: distracted

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This week has been characterised more by distractions that by any kind of diligent effort in the studio. That's the way life goes sometimes, isn't it. When I find it hard to focus on my bigger tasks and projects I try to tackle a few little things – like tidying up the bookshelves, or organising the stationery drawer, or wiping some marks off the walls. That way I can make up a little bit for feeling largely unproductive. Does that make sense?

So while I'm feeling a bit frustrated about any sewing progress this week, I do have an extra tidy house. Hopefully that means I can enjoy extra sewing time next week.

While it has been a different sort of week, it has also been rather nice. I had a sewing friend for three days (and watched her house grow on another day). I also had Caleb home sick for four days, which Daniel and I both enjoyed! I also got to pop out for the opening of the Minnawarra Art Award and thoroughly enjoyed that little outing.

On top of that, I heard that my artwork 'Trike' one a category prize and the Acquisitive Prize at the Australian Cotton Fibre Expo. What an honour!

Thanks to my sewing company, (and play company for the boys), I did at least manage to finish cutting out my latest (large!) quilt. Now I'm eagerly anticipating lot's of stitching next week.

Enjoy your weekend!

 

Today in Ten

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My day in 10 photos…
Really just another ordinary day, but sometimes usually ordinary days are the best kind…
The day started with half a coffee (inevitably, the second half gets cold before I get around to drinking it)…
…and time spent enjoying the beautiful early-morning post-rain light (and my new IKEA RASKOG drinks-cum-book trolley – I could happily use a couple more of these around the house!)…
…and the fact that I can enjoy the drops on the balcony balustrade even though my windows are very dirty…
It continued with a trip to the butcher and the vegie shop and the rest of the morning in the kitchen…
…accompanied by a grubby bubby…
We have four lasagnes and four meals of sweet curry to show for our morning! (I try to keep plenty of meals in the freezer so that I always have an easy dinner handy).
I got to enjoy my lunch while Marcus played nicely. He does so well in his playpen, and usually has his head in the toy bucket looking for new treasures.
As usual, Daniel joined me for lunch.
I am so happy that he and I have come to an agreeable arrangement for his afternoon naps.
One that no longer involves turning Mummy's bed and bedroom inside out and upside down, but rather involves snuggling up on the studio couch while Mummy cuts out quilt pieces… (He shares a room with Marcus so he has to take his afternoon naps elsewhere).
Cutting out a new quilt takes perseverance. I don't enjoy it, but working away at it for half an hour or an hour here and there gets me there in the end. (I love my regular afternoon studio time.)

And we all love after-school coffee time and play time! That's when I try to slow down for the rest of the day. Well, until the kids go to bed, anyway. I still only managed half a cup of coffee before getting distracted, though.

I hope you had a good day too, whether it was ordinary or not so ordinary.

By the way, I'll be sending out a new newsletter soon. If you haven't signed up yet, you can do so in the sidebar of this blog.

 

Ric Raccy School Holiday Sewing Marathon

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So Hannah and I had plans to sew a Ric Rac doll during these past school holidays. Hannah wanted to make a Kinder Girl, and I was going to make Little Red and Elsie too. And then, when we pulled out the sewing machine to get started, it was a lovely rainy indoor kind of day, and Grandma, who was staying with us, decided to make an Elsie too, and Aaron asked to make a Beet from my first Ric Rac pattern (I still love it!). So suddenly there were fabric scraps and doll arms and legs and pins and stuffing everywhere!

We had fun though. Aaron and Hannah are able to work largely independently now, just coming to Mum and I for quick checks at regular intervals. (It was great to have Mum here to keep them going when I was busy with Marcus).

And the next day, when friends came over to play, the kids were keen to keep sewing, and pulled out Hannah's little Creative Card from Jodie to make some birds. They did a great job, too!

Hopefully I can share the completed dolls soon. They are turning out great!

 

In My Portfolio: It’s a Wonderful World

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It’s a Wonderful World
© Ruth de Vos 2011

Size: 180cm H by 200 cm W
Materials: procion fabric dye, fabric paint cotton homespun, cotton batting
Techniques: hand-dyed, screen-printed, machine pieced, machine quilted

Available for purchase here.

This artworks has a sleeve stitched onto the back for hanging purposes, and can be hung using a gallery-style hanging system, or with two screws in the wall. More info including pictures here: http://ruthdevos.com/blog/how-to-hang-an-art-quilt/

View more of my artwork at www.ruthdevos.com

On people and softies and play quilts…

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Little people’s drawings of little people are just about my most favourite thing ever (which any of you longer term readers probably already know)! I love it how every young child develops their own signature ‘person’ drawing, which over time develops along with that child.

These ones are by Daniel. He’s doesn’t have as much interest in drawing as the three older children did, so I’m very happy to have these.

My sister Viv knows that I love drawings of people by children, too and tries to coax one out of her children every so often, to send to me. My favourite kind of mail!

And here’s something else I really love: the softies that Viv made with her two children and some of their friends.

To keep it simple, they used fabric markers instead of screen-printing. The children ranged in age from two to eight. Didn’t they do a great job? Unfortunately Viv doesn’t keep a blog (yet…) but here‘s her Pinterest board of some of her creative projects AND her own paintings. I am – well, actually, Marcus is – the proud owner of that bird mobile.

These softies were inspired by ones I made with the kids once.

Over the summer, I also made some softies/cushions to put in my shop for those of you who are interested. They are finally finished. There’s a Little Man softie, based on Aaron’s drawing, and a Caleb softie, drawn by Caleb.

I also made some play quilts, incorporating various screen-printed panels, that coordinate with the softies. I love how these quilts turned out, but I did not love making them, so I will not be doing them again.

 

 

Hand quilting bordering on embroidery

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Over the past year or so, hand-quilting has started to make an appearance in my quilts. Just a little bit here and there.

I love how it can be used to add highlights to a quilt. Or texture.

I also love how relaxing is to stitch away by hand.

I’ve been playing with some of the traditional embroidery stitches that I could remember – french knots, seed stitch, chain stitch, chicken feet (I’m sure there’s a proper name for that one).

So I was excited when a recent book purchase, The Stitch Bible arrived in the mail. Although this is primarily a catalogue of stitches categorised into several different types of embroidery (e.g freestyle, hardanger, black work, gold work), I’m looking forward to applying many of these stitches to my quilts over the years.

I’m not sure when quilting becomes embroidery or vice versa. In my mind, quilting has a functional purpose – to hold the layers of the quilt together over time. Embroidery, to my way of thinking, has a decorative purpose. While all my quilts are ditch-stitched (that is, quilted along the seam lines), many of them have a whole lot of extra quilting that is both functional and decorative.

While I’m slowly working away on my pile of handwork here, Hannah is tackling her quilt a whole lot faster .You may remember it from here and here. She lost her steam soon after that. She did a little bit here and there, but wasn’t really making much progress. With a bit of encouragement, she picked it up again last week as a school holiday project and had it all pieced together in no time. We layered it together, and now Hannah is hand-quilting it.

We had several choices here. If it was going to be machine-quilted, either I had to do it, or I had to teach her to use my own sewing machine. I’m not really ready for her to start using my machines. The old one she currently uses is more that sufficient for now. So I gave her a choice between me quilting by machine, or Hannah quilting it herself by hand. I love it that she chose to do it herself by hand – that’s where stubbornness can be a blessing! :)

I hope be adding some of those new quilts of mine to my shop over the next few weeks.

Enlarging a new quilt design

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I know I said that I have seven quilts to finish still, but the quilt in my head wanted to be developed. So this week I went for it.


Starting with a sketch of my intended quilt design, I enlarged it to a more manageable size.  I love PosteRazor for this. Where I used to enlarge my drawings with the photocopier over and over until they were the right size (that’s a lot of 20 cent pieces at the local library!), now I take a photo of my drawing. Using PosteRazor I can say exactly how big I want it to be, and it produces a PDF file of the image split over as many A4 pages as necessary.

At this stage I only needed it large enough to be able to draw up a working pattern from it. Usually that is about A3, or maybe A2 for more complex designs. This time I had to go up to A1 size! That tells me this is going to be a major project.

After printing out the enlarged drawing, the pages needed to be trimmed and stuck together to form the complete image. I laid tracing paper over this  enlarged image, and using the drawing as a guide, I drew up the quilt pattern. While drawing the quilt pattern I am thinking about the seams of the quilt. My intention here is to delineate blocks of colour – each of these will be a separate piece of fabric in the quilt.

With the quilt pattern drawn up, I needed to enlarge it to the size that I want to quilt to be. I did this in the same way as before – by taking a photo of the pattern and enlarging it with PosteRazor. It took 70 sheets of A4 paper to print an image that is 180cm wide by 180cm high. This is going to be big!


While I had the enlarged pattern all stuck together on the dining table (well, half of it – the other half is hanging off the side of the table) I also traced it onto interfacing. That means that I’m now ready to cut out the pieces. That’s always a big job, but I’m excited about this quilt, so I’m looking forward to getting started with the next step.

This quilt will be roughly the same size as my biggest quilt to date, ‘It’s a Wonderful World‘. I shared that one here. Excuse the poor images in that quilt – I’ll feature it again on Friday as my In My Portfolio post with better images.