Circles and squares - oh this one was a challenge!

I was very excited when I saw this months theme of circles and squares, and prepared my brain for taking in all things round and curvy for inspiration.  Inspiration never struck and my sketchbook was looking very empty, until I sat myself down with the goal of just playing with shapes. 

I doodled and played with balance and scale, looked up cathedral window projects in pinterest, googled circles and squares which for some reason threw up lots of pastry buns, but nothing was making that lightbulb go off and I was starting to crave a cuppa and a chocolate croissant.

I remembered Leonardo daVinci's Vitruvian man, that shows the symmetry of the human body inside a circle, and started playing with circles inside squares and squares inside circles.  Eventually, I got something I was happy with and then I got stuck again.

I've noticed in these challenges that the greater challenge sometimes, when you have settled on an idea, is how to make it?  I thought  about needle turn applique or sew and turn inside out applique but eventually settled on raw edge applique using bondaweb.  

I realised, in the middle of making it, I should have used fabric mod podge as it doesnt fray and when you iron it, you can still move it, if you need to.  

The other thing I've learned with these challenges is my mind is often thinking of bed quilts when I'm brainstorming and sometimes the idea wants to a bigger piece.  I struggle with that; keeping it small so the project is manageable in the timeframe and fun to make, and not a burden that a bigger project would be.  This is what I think it could be made large: 

 But for this challenge I decied to make the one flower and chose the slanted stalk over the lollipop look of the straight one.  I thought it might look a bit contrived at such a jaunty angle but I think it works.  For some reason we all agreed on orange binding (feels a bit Irish Flag to me!).  I did suggest Fuchsia but Orange won out - probably the influece of Halloween colours being so prominent at this time of year.  

 So here you have it : a cirle and square inspired spring flower in the middle of Autumn!

Dare to be Square

 I had so many ideas for this quarter's challenge - Circles and Squares, that I had real difficulty narrowing the options down to just one project. In the end my inspiration was a quilt, that I came across on a random swipe through Pinterest, with fabric circles appliqued to a background quilted in squares.

I decided to up the ante for the theme by having a black and white gingham fabric for the background and using only dotty fabric for my appliqued circles.

 

The gingham background fabric was quilted rows in a grid pattern and all of the appliqued circle were shadow quilted in the round (or just appliqued for the smaller circles) except this one hence the name of this quilt :)

I love receiving, and fortunately, my family are happy to buy me as birthday and Christmas presents, perfume from a well-known perfumier, who tie up their lovely cream and black boxes and bags with black grosgrain ribbon. I have a nice, little store of this ribbon which I was able to use to bind this challenge quilt. It is only wide enough for a single width binding, which I have stitched down with a zig-zag stitch all round. 

 

One of my other intentions for this challenge was a Halloween themed noughts and crosses quilt for the grandsons, so when I changed my mind to make Dare to be Square instead nearly all of my dotty fabrics were from a Halloween layer cake. 

 

So, along with the cushion from last year's Challenge I had the ideal setting for our hall table for Halloween last night :)

Happy to have completed another Endeavourers Challenge and looking forward to seeing the always fabulous projects my fellow Endeavourers have produced this quarter. 

If you would like to see what else I have been sewing for Halloween head on over to Celtic Thistle Stitches for a quick peek :)

Squares and Circles

 I saw a show with interlocking ovals and circles and thought I'd try something like it. The circles are raw edge applique and did fancy stitching around the inside and outside of the larger circles. A few beads were added after finished the quilting. The colors seem to have muted with the photo - there is more red in the original piece.

Per ardua ad astra

 

Thank you everyone for your patience. I have finished at last - though the photos are indoor/nighttime and don't show the colours well. 

My son asked me a while ago if I could make a picture for my grandson's room, which would also be a memory of my father, who sadly died last November. I thought the collage theme would be a good opportunity to do that so I started by drawing the main elements onto a piece of linen stabilised with freezer paper and fusing on the hexagons for the sky and  scallop strips for the sea. I then attached the piece to wadding by machine stitching wavy lines (sky) and hand stitching (sea). I then fused on the gold frame and quilted with straight lines.

After that, I fused on the various elements apart from the metal cogs, which I glued on at the very end. The sausage dog is lighter than the photo and is velvet with leather ears and nose and I was very surprised and impressed that the velvet didn't fray. The plane was printed onto fabric.

Unfortunately it looked very drab and I struggled to decide how to brighten up the picture until I realised I could liven it up by getting more colour into the frame.  That allowed me to put the words into the main picture where I thought there was too much empty space.

I've never been a fan of fusing in quilts before but, apart from the trials of actually finding time to do this, I really enjoyed the collage techniques and I was very pleased with effect. In particular, I could never have got the dog's tail or the shine on the balloon so precise with turned applique and the fabric spots would have taken forever. I feel I've been missing a trick all these years! When I get a chance, I will take a better photo and give more detail of the story behind this quilt over on Rainbow Hare.

I enjoyed seeing everyone's collage quilts and I'm really looking forward to seeing the circles and squares in November. I will be sure to start very early this quarter :)

New Theme Announcement

Thank you for all your wonderful "Collage" quilts. They were all so creative and fun. It's time to choose the next theme. This is the list we're working from. 

1. Patterns in Nature
2. Vintage
3. Circles and Squares
4. Spices
5. Mosaic
6. TBA (Edited to add "Harmony" to the list)

I've removed "Collage" from the list to narrow it down to the remaining categories. For our next theme, the Random Picker Wheel landed on number 3:

 "Circles and Squares."

https://tools-unite.com/tools/random-picker-wheel

The deadline for this theme is November 1st, 2023, at 10:00 am GMT but remember you can always put your post up earlier and schedule it.

In the meantime, you are welcome to share your thoughts, ideas and progress here on The Endeavourers Blog.

Happy Sewing!

Barbara

Bountiful Bouquet Collage

With such a wide-open topic, I thought I would use this opportunity to blend a lot of vintage materials together with some new-to-me techniques. I buy crates of linens at auctions, and I have even rescued sewing baskets from the side of the road, and it is always so much fun to find out what's inside! 

 So I pulled together a shredded tablecloth, a torn feed sack with a lovely tatted border, hem-stitched linen napkins, and old handkerchiefs, and combined them with some new materials. I count the work of six other makers besides me in this piece!

A collage of flowers, 1930s to 2023

 

Dogwood embroidery from a torn tablecloth of the 1950s.  I added the spiral print which I ended up not liking. But I can always cover them up with other flowers, and there are three more sections of this embroidery to use elsewhere.  :)

Some of the new materials I used were Jacquard Lumiere paints, Tsukneko VersaMagic chalk ink pads, Lutradur, and variegated WonderFil threads. To see more details and to read more about how I made it, you can go to my home blog Deep in the Heart of Textiles.

As always, I enjoyed working on this challenge, and I loved the chance to use up some vintage scraps!

Floating around

 Like so many of these challenges I took forever to decide upon my project for this theme. 

My lightbulb moment was coming across this unfinished project from the textile printing summer school I attended last year. I realised that I could use this as the starting point for a bigger piece of work with a water/underwater theme.

Rummaging through my cupboards I came across these orphan blocks that I thought would work with the original piece and fit the watery theme.

This is what I ended up with! You can see the original blocks, which have now been embellished with embroidery stitches, FMQ stitching and a random selection of beads and sequins. 

My luckiest find, and the focal point of Floating Around, was this piece of frog and lily pad cross stitch that I inherited when my parents passed away four years ago. My mother was an avid cross stitcher and left a box full of pieces just like this, so I am really pleased to have been able to put this one, at least, to use.

I also inherited several pots and blister packs of beads so they were put to use in Floating Around too. 

My intention is to mount Floating Around on a canvas but that will have to wait until I find one the correct size! 

Looking forward to seeing the results of my fellow Endeavourers responses to this quarter's challenge, they will, no doubt, be inspiring as usual. 

If you want to read more about the construction of Floating Around head on over to Celtic Thistle Stitches

Collage: Fantasticat

When the prompt was selected, I thought I'd make a quilt I've been wanting to make for a long time. But then, I realized I could use it for a different upcoming prompt. Never fear. You'll see it eventually. Instead, I went in search of something else. Eventually, I came across a photograph I'd saved at least two years before. It was an illustration from the NYTimes by artist and illustrator Angie Wang. 

When I saw her illustration, I knew right away I wanted to make a quilt from it. I wrote to the artist and requested her permission. But then, so much time passed, that I felt it was important to ask again...just to be sure. She responded saying she was "excited about it!" Okay, then. So off I went. Here is the quilt I call "Fantasticat."

Usually, when I make a quilt like this, I start from the center and make my way outward. For this one, I did just the opposite, starting at the outer edges and making my way inward.

My stash is not heavy with solids, and I was trying to stay fairly true to the colors she'd used.

Even with borders, my quilt ended up at 19 x 19 inches. So you can see that some of the pieces were very, very small.

As I reached the middle, it was hard to decide which pieces went over which. 

Any color could have served as the background "foundation" piece.

When all the color was added, I settled on white as the foundation, peeled the color off my teflon pressing sheet, and fused the whole of it to a white background.

From there I added borders. That inner purple is a hand-woven fabrics brought to me from Guatemala by a friend of my son.

And then I quilted it using a microtex needle and monofilament thread.

The outer border was quilted with a variegated thread in a ribbon motif to finish it off.

The quilt back was made using some fabric I'd used in another quilt. The colors were just right, and so that was a lucky find in my stash. I added hanging pockets and a center loop.

For small quilts, I like this method of running a dowel through to keep everything straight and flat.

And now it has a place of honor among the other cats in my stairwell "Mewseum."

I hope you like my quilt. I had so much fun making it. Working with so many bright colors was a delight for the eyes. 

A Humming Collage

 My first thought when I saw that the new theme was collage was to do something simple, whatever that would be. I had a difficult time coming up with a subject along those lines. I started to peruse my books to see if I had any inspiration, and that's when I stumbled upon this book, given to me by my daughter awhile ago. 

I had completely forgotten that I even had this book. When she gave it to me, I thought I'd likely never try anything like that, but still hung on to the book. Even when I started paging through, I thought "don't think I could do this". On the other hand, it was very intriguing, and it seemed to fit the collage theme! 

Then Christian Dalbec, a photographer from northern Minnesota that I follow on Instagram, posted a photo of a hummingbird on his Instagram feed, a cropped image of the hummingbird's head, which you can see here. I reached out to Christian to ask if I could use his photo as inspiration for this challenge, and he agreed. Now I was committed. 

After reading through the book, watching some Susan Carlson videos and studying Christian's photograph, I dove in, sketching out the hummingbird head on fabric, then starting the process of building the collage. To say it made a huge mess is an understatement (bits of fabric everywhere), but what grand fun! 

This is the image in its early stages. There was much pinning and eventually gluing. Even after the pieces were tacked on with glue, some were changed. I could only work for so long before I had to step away and work on other projects, just to give my brain a break. However, I thoroughly enjoyed this challenge. 

Eventually, it was finished. Once all the pieces were glued down, I did some thread painting using threads that matched the fabrics. My free motion quilting skills are still not great, and I didn't want my rudimentary skills with thread painting to be too obvious. It was fun to look at the back and see how my quilting got more relaxed and improved as I went along. 

This photo doesn't show it well, but I thought you'd enjoy seeing the back. I used 12 different thread colors, all Aurifil 50 wt., all from my thread stash. It was grand fun until it came time to bury the threads! 

And finally, the finish! 

This was, by far, my most challenging project since I've been part of this group. It was so much fun, but so much work! Will I make another one? I'm not sure, but I have been thinking about subjects, so maybe. This finished piece measures 18.5 inches by 26.5 inches, a very small project compared to the size of the projects worked on by Susan Carlson, the author of Serendipity Quilts. I'm terribly tempted to do something on a larger scale, but then I think of the time and the mess - but oh, the fun! 

I'll write up more details about the creating of this piece on my personal blog, if you are interested. Thanks for the fun, yet challenging, challenge! 

Wendy

Collage

 

Collage was never my forte since I don't really like them. But this is a group of most of the cats of whom we have been the guardian. Starting at the upper left that's Iksandria (aka Ikky) then Ahknaton (aka Nuttin) - we were on an Egyptian craze at the time, then there's Mo, Gandalf (aka Pinky), Miaowara Llasa (named after the Samurai Cat, if you don't know who that is go to Wikipedia), Merlin (aka Curly), and Fuzz (our current baby). 

If you look closely, the quilting has several words included, upper tight is Meow. Try and find the others :)

Improv fun!

I dip in and out of collage as a quilt making techinque and I am always surprised that there are so many different ways to collage a textile piece.  

Improv piece of the fastnet rock lighthouse using fabrics other then cotton.

Making Waves using bondaweb and raw edge, I entered this into an Irish Patchwork Society exhibition, inspired by the Great Wave by Hokusai.

Using up scraps from a Laura Heine collage workshop to make Jupiter!

Whimsical fun using scraps and big stitch embroidery in the style of Laura Wasilowski.

So when the theme of collage popped up I thought : Yes!  I've got this... and then I thought what can I make that's not the same as all of the above?  I got stuck! 

Then, the opportunity came to sign up for a collage portrait class, with Paula Rafferty, at the River of Dreams annual exhibiton in Limerick and I jumped at the chance.  We made a portrait of Dolores O'Riordan from the Cranberries, also from Limerick, and I had the opportunity so many times to hear her sing and the band play as I was growing up, when they were starting our on their amazing music journey.

 

In the end though, I ended up going back to improv and having a play.  One of my favourite places on the West coast of Ireland, about an hours drive away, is Kilkee.  It has a horseshoe bay and two cliff walks on either side of the beach.  Maybe this colourful, cartoonish, childlike collage is my go to.  I don't know, but I had a lot of fun playing with shape and colour and straightline quilted it to put in a frame.

 

I think I might change or add to the car pulling the boat, thats a tiny bit too basic I think.  I really like the houses falling away on the frame and I think this could be fun to make bigger and add more detail, like the steps going down to the beach and some boats in the sea.  Otherwise, I quite like its happy maddness, and it was very much a happy way to spend a rainy afternoon playing with scraps!