Fun Stuff

Hello Creative friends!

lately I´ve been making fun stuff, yep, no stressing about making life like fabric portraits or being acclaimed as the number 1 fabric artist in the world, Nope! it´s been all about being cool, trying new stuff, spending more money on craft stuff, buying stuff I already had, but forgotten I had, you know, just cruising along 🙂

So here is one of my fun projects. The pattern Here is from Pam Holland, who in my book is a world acclaimed fabric artist, she is truly brilliant. I had great fun drawing and colouring fabric, and the colours are so vibrant, it really is such a fun and gorgeous project.

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I´ve hung it up so it hides the electrical distribution panel at the entrance.

My other project is a coloured and thread painted fabric Panel. Now that winter has arrived, we light a fire in the fireplace every night, it´s set up to heat the radiators in the house, the problem with this, is that sometimes before it gets going it can smoke a bit, and I didn’t want my precious Rhino quilt Here to get grey and grubby from the smoke, and I wouldn’t be able to wash it. So I decided to cover it with a panel, that took minimal effort and after winter I can take it off and wash it, and my rhino will reappear fresh as a daisy in the springtime again.

I have meters of this panel batik, so I cut some of it, and had some fun with it.

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So now in the evenings I don´t see my Rhino, but I do get to look up at my fun panel.

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And to top it all, my aunt who is a retired seamstress gave me her treadle sewing machine. Well my mom asked her if she would sell it, because she wanted to give it to me as a present, but my aunt offered it, so mom took it to a sewing machine professional who tuned it up etc. I am so happy with it, it sews like a dream. It´s a Portuguese model called Oliva, from the 1940s, they don´t make them anymore.

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It still has the original manual, isn´t that great!

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This machine is just brilliant and I am having loads of fun with it.

Thanks for popping by, have Fun.

Isabella´s Portrait

I have delved into the scary world of fabric face portraiture, and I found it really daunting 😲 The best part of course was all the planning in my head, and buying the fabric, after that it was all about feeling lost and frustrated, why do I do this to myself!! And then of course because I work full time and then it´s cooking dinner, keeping house and all the boring stuff we have to do, I only get to work on my projects on weekends and even then, not all weekends and only a few hours at a time. So, the projects tend to drag on and on to the point where I get fed up with looking at the same project for ever, and then declare it finished, even if it needs more tweaking. That’s kind of what happened here, but also because I was scared that if I carried on, I would mess it all up.

I read up on some of the techniques used, which consists mainly of making a pattern for each piece of fabric and using fusible, but I don´t like to use fusible on art quilts and I´m not much of a pattern maker, I prefer to just glue the pieces down with craft glue, so that I can change my mind at any time, spray some water on it and peel it off. So basically I´m just winging it as I go along I never do any real prep work, just sort of dive in and start doing.

Anyway, here is the outcome of my first attempt at making people. My model of course is my gorgeous granddaughter Isabella, I have certainly not done her justice but she loves the portrait anyway, tells everyone that it´s her 😀

I won´t bore you with details of how I made it, there are plenty of sites and videos of people far better equipped than I who explain how to go about making a portrait quilt, I´ll just leave you with a few photos of mine.

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It´s also thanks to my daughter Andi who pointed out that the features needed more definition, that I allowed myself to lose some of the fear and go bolder.

I must also add that I posted a photo on an art quilt page on FB and a lady commented on all the things I should do to make it better, I must say that although I really appreciated all the constructive criticism, I didn´t do any of it 😀 Once I consider something finished, it´s finished. I will try to do better on the next one, and yes, even though this is hard, I´m making another one very soon, so stay tuned 🙂

And to end today´s blog here is a far better image of Isabella.

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