Mosaic: Vintage Brooch

For this theme of Mosaic, I was not looking forward to adding fusible web to small pieces of fabric and then trying to manipulate them into place.  Fortunately I found the work of Colleen Ansbaugh!  In an article in the Fall 2021 issue of Quilting Arts, she recommended putting down a large area of fusible web as a background, and then adding the small pieces of fabric on top.  And then once they were all fused in place, adding a layer of netting to hold all the edges down through the stresses of stitching.

So that is the technique I followed, to recreate the look of this vintage brooch on a larger scale.

I cheated a little bit by "binding" it with a large wooden hoop. :)

This is not one of my favorites.  When I look at the individual pieces of each flower, I feel like I copied the original satisfactorily, but the overall effect reminds me of a red crab and two eyeballs.  Even my phone suggested the "food" filter when I took the photo.  And I don't think I will be doing this technique again -- I do not enjoy working with tiny pieces.  But as always, I enjoyed the process and stretching my skills!

If you would like to see more of the steps of creating this piece, you can visit my blog Deep in the Heart of Textiles. 

Mosaic Underfoot

 Well, if that title doesn't pique your curiosity, right? As usual, my idea for this theme prompt is not the idea I ended up using. I had a little fun with this prompt, using inspiration from a few artists I follow on social media. 

Are you familiar with pothole art? A Google search will bring up all kinds of examples. I follow a couple of artists on Instagram, and I think the idea of taking something unsightly like a pothole and making it a piece of art to see while strolling along is a fun idea. So I decided to take my mosaic underfoot and try some pothole art with fabric. 

There's so much about this piece that I would change, if I were to do it again, but let's ignore that and I'll tell you how I constructed it. The mosaic strips were strips made in an online improv workshop that had been sitting and waiting to be used. I freehand cut a shape from the sewn strips and then added the black border. The tricky part was adding the cracks and the sidewalk, or background, to the piece. That took a little thinking, but I made it work. The finished quilt is 20 x 22 inches. 

I was a little perplexed about how to quilt it, so I actually made a little sample piece to mess around with. 

This little sample is about 9" x 13". I used it to try out quilting designs in the mosaic and also to come up with the sidewalk design. I also messed around with thread colors for the sidewalk. In the end, I went with a rectangular sidewalk design, and used a brown thread to give it more of a dirty street look. I'm not sure I achieved that, and am still pondering what I would do differently next time (if there is one!). 

The quilting in the mosaic is just random lines throughout the design. I used a light orange thread, so it blended in well with the mosaic. 

I'll likely share more information about this quilt on my blog, if you are interested. I'm not sure this resembles pothole art, but I think it met the mosaic challenge. 

What a fun year of challenges in 2024! Thanks to Janine and Barbara for keeping the group moving forward! 

Wendy 

 

After some false starts, my mosaic quilt was inspired by this post that I came across on X. I haven't been able to share it properly here so here is a link and a screenshot.

 

Doesn't that remind you of little Fiona?

This photo shows the steps I used to make the quilt and there is a bit more detail on my blog but I think we can safely say that mosaic quilt making is not my forte!

Now, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone else's mosaics :)

Ostia Antica

 When this theme was suggested I bought myself a copy of "Stitched Photo Mosaic Quilting" by Timna Tarr. I found a video of our granddaughter that was going to provide a still photo for the basis of my first mosaic quilting. Then I promptly dithered over the whole process of translating the video into a still photo, (finally achieved!) and working out how and where to get it printed at the optimum size without bankrupting myself in the process (!). 

Whilst this thought process was still rattling about in my brain, I came across some photos on Social Media of the Mosaic of the Provinces at Ostia Antica, an ancient Roman city and the seaport of Ancient Rome. As you can tell from the title of this post the Photo Mosaic quilt idea was swiftly jettisoned, to be returned to later :)

Being inspired by the photos to delve further into the history and nature of the Mosaics at Ostia Antica I discovered a line drawing from 1912 of the full mosaic, which you can see here The drawing just looked like a quilt pattern to me, so I decided to base my quilt for this quarter's theme around one of the mosaic squares from the drawing of the original.

The original mosaics were made in black and white tiles and I did consider making a monochrome quilt, but in the end I decided that this quilt was inspired by not a copy so went with fabrics that looked liked tiling instead.

The cream fabric has a tone on tone check on it which you can't really see in the photo and the pink fabric reminded me of Venice so was a shoo-in for the central square :)

I found a length of this lovely fabric in my stash and thought it would be ideal for the backing fabric.

The blocks were fairly straightforward to put together. The cream squares within the purple strips were 6.5" squares, the purple strips were 1.5" wide, the pink squares were 2.5" and the cream borders were 2.5" strips too.

I wanted the quilting of the piece to reflect the Roman part of the inspiration for the quilt so I quilted straight lines in the purple strips - Roman roads, even in the hilly North of England and Southern Scotland were straight.

 My centre block was the ideal place for some cross-hatch quilting that resembles rows of the Roman Numeral - X :)

The original Mosaic of the Provinces has four fish swimming at the centre to represent the port, so I decided to quilt the open cream blocks with a fish. I ordered some dolphin templates to use for the blocks but they did not arrive in time, so I hunted through my many craft magazines and found this needlelace template to use instead.

The circle quilting in the remaining blocks is a nod to the shields portrayed in several of the other sections of the Mosaic. Some wavy lines to represent the sea were added to the border strips.

I used a New to Me binding method, using the backing fabric as the binding and finished it off with a zig-zag (now known as Roman Numeral V!) stitch to attach the binding to the front of the quilt:)

 I was tempted to call this quilt "A port in the storm" as I was working on it (before the power went out!) whilst Storm Eowyn was flinging waves up to our door and rattling our windows till we were sure they were going to fall in! Thankfully, the sea eventually calmed down, the windows withstood the ferocious winds and the power came back so it was all fine in the end.

Once again, I have enjoyed meeting this latest Endeavourer Challenge and look forward to seeing the wonderful ways that my fellow Endeavourers have interpreted the theme!

Mosaics: Water Lilies

 At first I had many ideas for "mosaics". But none of them worked. I almost decided to skip this posting. Then an idea came to me:

Not thinking this is really a mosaic. Decided that the biological definition applied: an individual (especially an animal) composed of cells of two genetically different types.

The "flower" in yellow orange is actually a Dorset button that I made specially for this.