Theme for August

Thank you, everyone, for the wonderful 'Circus' quilts. I loved all of them!

Now, we have four themes left:

1. Effervescent

2. Favourite Book

3. Motion

4. Sashiko

The Random Spinner has chosen 1. Effervescent and that sounds very tricky to me but I'm sure you will all come up with fantastic quilts.

The Reveal will be on August 1st 2025 at 10am.

In the meantime have a great Summer :D

Sad Day at the Circus

 Going to the circus is a day full of anticipation. The excitement of seeing the antics of the clowns, the finesse of the acrobats, and all the animals. On July 6, 1944, people were gathering in Hartford, Connecticut to attend the circus. In those days, circus events took place under a huge canvas tent called the Big Top. This particular circus was unique in that it was the largest Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey circus in the country. The huge tent could seat 9,000 people. Unforunately, it was a historical day for quite another reason. The Big Tent was coated with parafin wax dissolved in gasoline, a common waterproofing method used at the time. During the event, a fire broke out, and disaster ensued. You can read about the horrific event here. 

My daughter told me about this little known (to me) piece of history, and I decided to create my challenge quilt to remember this sad event. 

I started by creating the red and white background to signify the huge circus tents. If you read the article, you may note that one photo shows Emmett Kelly, the famous sad circus clown, carrying a water bucket, so I used a similar facial expression on my clown. The white Grunge fabric, with its gray splotches, represents the smoky air. 

The words were made using fabric markers, because I was behind schedule on this quilt and was leaving on vacation in a matter of days, so I took the easy route of the markers. The clowns' face was glue-basted and then sewn to the background using raw-edge applique. 

For the quilting, I used yellow thread and stitched flames over the entire quilt, but not the face. 

I had this fun circus print on my shelf and decided to use some of it for the backing fabric. 

The finished quilt is 17" x 18.5". This was definitely a challenge for me. It took me awhile to come up with an idea, but I am satisfied that I met the challenge. 

Wendy

Circus

 I guess I was not really inspired by this theme. So here is Flea Circus: Acrobats. First thought was to put this on a black felt background and say it was a flea circus on a dog but decided to actually do a little quilting;)

"Circus" Reveal: Tula-Tu Goes to the Circus

On February 1st, just a day or two before our “Circus” prompt was announced, one of the elephants at the Oregon Zoo gave birth to a new baby. The Oregon Zoo has a robust elephant breeding program, and many elephants have been born during the nearly 50 years we’ve lived in Oregon. With the prompt, though, I sat up and took notice of this new baby more than I ever have before. Here’s an announcement from our local newspaper.

Oh my gosh. Is she adorable, or what?

She was given the name, Tula-Tu. Tula means “balance” in Sanskritt. The suffix, “-Tu” is to honor her mother Rose-Tu and her grandmother, Me-Tu. (And we’ve lived in Oregon long enough to remember when Rose-Tu was born.)

Well, and I got so excited about Tula-Tu that we decided to make a trip to the zoo to see her in person. This is one of the photos I took of her that day.

My quilt was already finished by the time we saw Tula-Tu in person. Earlier, I was spending time looking at published photos for something that could be rendered into fabric. I selected and rejected a lot of photos. And then this photo of Tula-Tu came out in a fund-raising newsletter.

And I loved the sassy look on that little baby, so I set about rendering her into a quilt. These are done by fusing the pieces to a teflon pressing sheet…

Bit by bit…

Piece by piece…

Paying attention to the color shading and the layering.

When I’m satisfied with the main subject, I peel it from the teflon pressing sheet, and then fuse it to a background. And, yes, these are zoo elephants. I turned them into circus elephants by taking them on a field trip to the Circus Big Top. Tula-Tu can’t wait to get her trunk wrapped around some of those circus peanuts.

From there, I added two borders and backed it with just the batting.

I did some thread painting on the elephants and the “wood shavings.” This was done just through the quilt top and the batting.

I followed the contours of their faces and trunks, but I was also using the picture to help see the wrinkles in their leathery skin.

When the thread-painting was finished, I added the quilt back, and did the remainder of the quilting through all three layers. The tan fabric was some I purchased during a visit to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I bought it because it looked like sand, but it can serve as the wood shavings commonly seen at circuses too. I just quilted some lines following the design in the fabric.

And I outlined the stripes in the circus tent for texture.

From there, it just needed a binding.

I used the same red from the inner border.

And then my quilt was finished. I had so much fun making this. Following the story about Tula-Tu made the time spent all the more precious.

Here’s how it looks from the back. It finishes at 19 x 25 inches.

Just for grins, I'll leave you with a video of Tula-Tu. I couldn't love her any more if she were my own baby. If you can't see the video, then click right here.

Circus Horse

 

Whenever we have had themes before it has taken more than a year for mine to come up so when I chose 'circus' and it was the first be to be drawn (by Barbara) I was shocked. I had to wait for the SAHRR to finish before I had time to start and that gave me time for a million ideas. 

But, in the end, I decided to go with a true story. 

My childhood home was on the bank of a river and on the other side of the river were water meadows. Mostly, in the summer, they were grazed by beautiful black and white cows and sometimes, in the winter, they flooded and we had to walk round the road way to get to school. 

But once a year the circus came.

The circus people unlocked the big metal gate at the timber yard entrance and drove in with their trucks and trailers and caravans and tents and for a glorious week the world was giddy rush of colour and music. My Dad let them hook up their generators to our electric and they gave us free tickets to the greatest show in Church Meadows.

It began with the elephants coming for their morning bath in the river and ended with us children lying in bed, listening for the strange roars and wondering if the lions would get out of their caged trailers and eat us in our sleep!

Funnily enough, I have clearer memories of circus 'village' that sprung up out of nowhere and vanished like magic than the actual shows we watched inside the big top and my quilt is based on something that happened outside the tent.

One day, our elderly neighbours came back from the town with their shopping and said, we would never guess what they had just seen in the field. And of course we tried to guess- lions, monkeys, clowns, tight rope walkers, trapeze artists...But no.

"We saw them painting their horse!" 

"What colour?"

"It was a white horse and they were painting black spots on it! It made us chuckle".

I have taken a little license in the blue spots and I doubt the person painting was dressed as a clown...

I will post more about the making of this quilt on Rainbow Hare but I'll wait until tomorrow or Saturday because tomorrow I am (by complete coincidence) going to the circus with my little granddaughters and, perhaps I'll include some photos.

In the meantime, I'm really looking forward to seeing how everyone else has interpreted this theme :)

A Costume for a Performer

 As I was pondering what to do for this theme, I remembered an article I had read long ago, about making costumes for Cirque de Soleil.  The budget was not large, so the costumer made striking effects from unusual materials, including shower curtains!

I decided to make a simple tutu from the linens and laces I painted last year, with a purple batik for the background.  

A costume for a circus performer.

To add some sparkle, I used metallic thread with some decorative stitches, on both the background and on the petals of the skirt.

Some of the metallic thread.

I may add more embellishment, thread sketching, and beading in the future. I enjoyed using those painted linens, and playing with fancy thread!

(I can't get Blogger to let me schedule this post so the date will be the date I wrote it, not the proper reveal day of May 1.  :( )

New Theme

New Theme

A big thank you to everyone who linked up 'Mosaic' quilts. It was, as always, a wonderful collection. I'm always impressed at how all the quilts are so different, given that we work from the same prompt. 

We have a whole new slate of prompts to start off the new year:

1. Favorite Book

2. Effervescent

3. Sashiko

4. Circus

5. Motion

And the random generator wheel has chosen...

So our new theme is 'Circus'.

The Reveal Day will be May 1st at 10.00 GMT and, in the meantime, you are of course welcome to post anything related to this theme or art quilting in general here on The Endeavourers.

Happy Sewing!

Daisy Mosaic

For this project, I wanted to try a technique from this book by Timna Tarr. She has a page on Facebook, and her work with this technique is simply amazing. Her book is excellent, with excellent instructions.

At the beginning, I had a couple of false starts, both in the image I wanted to use, and then with the fabrics I wanted to use. In the end, I settled on this image.

The first step is to draw diagonal grid lines over the image. They can be of any size, but I was going by the book. Mine were 2 inches.

When it was all done, it looked something like this.

The next step is to number each square. That way, if your pieces get dropped or mixed up somehow, they're easier to put back in order.

As I went, I found that some areas were difficult to see with just a black sharpie. I went in search of one with white ink.

It's actually a "paint" pen. I was disappointed that it wouldn't work to use directly on fabric. It simply absorbs into the fabric and can't be seen. For my purposes, though, it worked great!

The next step was to cut two inch squares from freezer paper.

Those were numbered and then ironed to the backs of fabrics as I went.

For this project, I set up a foam core board I could use as a sort of design wall.

I could pin the pieces directly to the board.

And then, I just kept going.

I've only ever done machine applique, and so this method was new to me. I painted the edges of the fabric with starch and then folded them over the cut template.

The book suggested marking the colors before cutting the pieces in order to keep straight which color went where.

Soon you'll see that neither of these fabrics was used in my finished piece, but this is the only photo documentation I have of my process. Originally, I thought I'd do the flower petals in pink and the background in aqua, but then I changed my mind and went back to the original.

And while this method is often used as "needle turn applique," I was still stitching the edges by machine.

And I kept going with the pink for a while...

But eventually switched back to the original white color. It helped me to pin the image to the white board and pin directly over the top of it.

When it was all finished, it looked like this.

Before trimming, I sandwiched it for quilting. My first step was to outline all the petals. This was my one worry regardless of the color fabric I used. Would there be enough contrast for the petals to stand out? Since there wasn't, I decided to outline them in black.

And then I did some pebbling in the flower center.

When the quilting was finished, I trimmed off the triangular edges

And added a binding.

Here's how it looks from the back.

So I can't say I'm completely satisfied with how this turned out. Probably a different image would have worked better. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the process, and I'd try this again in the future if it seemed like the best way to complete a project. I hope you like my quilt!