Welcome Swallow Quilt

It's come to my attention that I've been remiss in not posting one of my quilts that I finished earlier this year (thanks Carol!).  It got lost amongst life I guess.

I love Welcome Swallows.  They are a small bird with a forked tail.  They make mud nests around human habitation and seem curious and lively.  I love the colour palette of their plumage too - indigo blue, grey, and burnt sienna.  I thought I might make a quilt using their colours and silhouettes of Swallows.

Here's how it started on my design wall.

I pieced a background using flying geese and half-square triangles and then began auditioning for hills as a foreground.

Eventually it morphed into this - dark indigo silhouettes of the Swallows, indigo and grey hills with touches of burnt sienna and mustard and burnt sienna barn.  I used discharge paste to create a line of trees that receded into the distance and this is about where I stalled.

I put it away for ages.  Eventually (and in a Spring kind of mood) I pulled it out, removed the hills, unpicked some of the sky to make it square and added grass and flowers to the foreground instead.  I added some colour to the bird silhouettes and added one larger fully coloured one in the foreground.

I free-motion quilted and appliquéd at the same time as I like to do and then free-motion quilted a flowing pattern in the sky using my domestic Bernina Aurora 400 QE.  I changed thread colours from  mid-blue at the top of the sky, light blue in the middle and cream near the grasses.

The grasses and flowers were free-motions appliquéd and quilted with matching thread colours.  I decided to bind it in similar colours to those in the quilt to have a border, but one that worked with the quilt.  You can see my scientific way of measuring those chunks of colour in the picture above.

And here's the finished quilt.  Once again my colours have been extra-saturated (I'm beginning to think it's the watermark program I'm using - time for an experiment I think).

Detail of the sky quilting.

Detail of the foreground Swallow.  He was done with coloured pencil and fabric medium on white fabric then cut out and appliquéd/quilted on.

And the pretty flowers, done in my hand-dyed fabrics.  I think the whole quilt has a completely different feel to it now - Spring rather than Autumn.  But I'm still interested in re-visiting my previous colour scheme.  However I won't be using those hills, I cut a few strips from them and used then in my Cerego 12 x 12 Purple Challenge quilt, the little pops of orange came from here!

And because I had to dig it out to photograph it, now I have this quilt hanging next to my sewing machine here on the boat.  Both Hubby and I love it, so I think it will stay for a while.

What'cha working on Wednesday

I could kick myself!  I was in such a hurry this morning to get my 12 x 12 Purple Colour Challenge entries into the mail (they have to arrive by Friday, I think I'll make it) that I didn't take a photo of my heron one.  I called it Dawn Ghost and now we are all going to have to wait until January, when I will see the exhibition that it will be hanging in.  I'll take a photo to share then.

In the meantime, this is what I'm working on:

I'm putting together a fabric palette for a new project.  Blogger is doing something to the saturation of my images, bumping it up a few notches, and I'm not sure how to fix that.  So if you mentally turn down the colour just a tad...  

I'm also doing some article writing, which is a new thing for me, but I'm enjoying it.  It's a bit more intense than blog writing (break out the grammar police!), but I think I'll get into a rhythm soon.

And I'm being watched over by these little guys.  They had a nest this spring under the dock where we are moored.  I could never see it, just hear them, and see Mum and Dad flying in and out.  The noise has ceased so I'm presuming they've all fledged, but I still see them around, zipping fast and free.  Beautiful.

Episode 9 Rain, rain, go away

On this podcast I whine about the weather, I admit it!  It's been revolting for a week now - floods and gales etc.  I'm pretty sure you're allowed to whinge after your chicken food shed door got ripped off, right?

This is taken out the back door in a relative break in the weather.

And my darling daughter took this one of me, clearing out the flooding drain.  Again.

I give a rundown on my Welcome Swallow quilt.  It's under the needle finally.  In this pic I'm quilting and appliqueing at the same time....'cause I can.

I also talk about mono printing - taking a single print off a surface, in this case a gelli plate - onto fabric.  I'm going to be doing a demonstration of it at our quilting club's regional day.  This is a picture of some mono printing on paper that I did with the kids.   It's been a little while, maybe I should do some more with them this holidays.  We really need some more rainy day activities!

BLUE Challenge quilts

Sue from ratherbequilting, asked to see finished photos of some of the bird and feather quilts I posted about way back here.

She's in luck because today I got photographs of my two BLUE challenge quilts emailed to me from the lovely Anne at Aotearoa Quilters.  Something happened to my pictures of the finished quiltlets and I emailed Anne, who received all the quilts for exhibition.  She obliged my humble request and sent me through pictures of both of them.

This one was titled (imaginatively) 'Blue Feather'.  It's looking a little squashed from it's journey and in hindsight, I think some quilting on the white background would have helped, but at the time I was loathe to disturb the simplicity.  You live and learn I suppose!

And this one was titled (I think!  Yikes, bad quilt documenting, slapping my own wrists!) 'Spring Flight'.  It is actually pretty square, it's just a slight angle on the photo.

The BLUE challenge received 95 quilts from all over the country and is currently on show at the Christchurch Quilt and Craft Fair (last day tomorrow) and then in a week or so will be at the Palmerston North Quilt and Craft Fair.  All quilts are for sale for $125.

I copied this straight from Aotearoa Quilter's Facebook page:

"And the Winners are:
1st - Mary Transom "Blue Girl"
Merits:
Gloria Scanlen "The Guiding Light"
Shirley Sparks "Summer Holiday"
Ella Brockhuizen "Violin Blues"
Congratulations to the winners and thank you to all who entered. Special thanks to Cecile at Unique Stitching for sponsoring the Challenge."

Here's a link to the Unique Stitching website, they have some pretty awesome stuff to play with!

PS - thanks for all your kind comments on my podcast!  I think I sound funny - but your own voice is always weird to yourself, right?!

Drawing and Quilting Birds - my feather fetish (let's see how many hits I get from that title!)

I've put down the UFO's for a little while and I'm working on a few new projects.  I've been mulling over thoughts for a while and then it's like they all collide and I'm away again, inspired and enthusiastic!

This swallow quilt is a what I'm working on today.  It's going to end up as 12" by 12" and will probably be an entry into the BLUE challenge that is being run by Aotearoa Quilters.  You can read more about it here.  It's open to non-members too, so go have a read.

This is a two layered quilt, with a cotton broadcloth base and a silk organza overlay.  I've mono-printed both layers, with a freezer paper mask in place over the swallows.  I've then painted the swallow on the top layer and worked them in coloured pencil on the base layer.

My coloured pencil work is a follow on from this experiment I did the other day.  I worked the Tui (a native New Zealand bird, pictured here puffed up in full song) from a photograph taken by my talented cousin.  You can see his work here on Flikr, he's dazzla65 - go check him out, he's amazing!

The top photo shows the 'before' version, before I painted over the coloured pencil with fabric medium.  It worked so well that I can't wait to use the technique in more quilts.  

This feather piece measures about 20" by 30" and it's work towards a challenge run by the Auckland Quilt Club.  It has a spine now, which makes it look better and now I'm debating on how to do the quilting.

I tried out some quilting ideas on this little piece.  The feather was drawn using Neocolor water-soluble pastels then painted over with fabric medium.  I've trimmed and bound it now and even added a label and hanging sleeve (I usually procrastinate over those tasks!) and it's another contender for entering into the 12 x 12 BLUE exhibition.

So can you see the theme?  I'm guessing I like birds....

Sunday Mumblings

It was frosty this morning.  Only our second frost this winter (and the first was yesterday).

But frosty mornings usually mean sunny days and, sure enough, today was lovely.

Everyone was out enjoying the sunshine.  The boss of the world thought he might herd the ducks.  They were having none of it, and fair enough, they're about twice his size.

The chooks have started laying.  They were hatched on New Year's Day, so bang on six months old.

Floppy (for obvious reasons) is a North Holland Blue, which looks very similar to Barred Rocks.

This girl is unnamed as yet and she's a mix of Light Sussex and Golden Laced Wyandotte.

We put the cows on the lawn to mow the grass.  Grass converting itself to beef, yum, yum.

I tried to work on my swallow quilt but the kids kept annoying me and each other so I got them outside for some sketching.  It worked a treat to get them settled down.

Mine's in the middle, but I think I like my daughter's on the left best.  Although my son's, on the right, might make an interesting quilting pattern!

Hope you had a lovely Sunday too.

Welcome Swallows on a cold day.

We've had a bit of a cold spell the last few days.  Southerly winds whistling up from the Antarctic.  Brrrr.  Wellington was hit very hard by stormy conditions and in the South Island there was lots of snow.  Up here at the top of the North Island, we don't get snow, thankfully, but we still had lots of rain and wind.  Today it's still cold but at least there was some sunshine.

When it was really cold I snapped these pictures of Welcome Swallows outside my studio window.  They perch on the firewood bin and in Spring they build their nest up in the rafters (and make a heck of a mess).

I don't know what was so interesting up above their heads, but periodically one would take off and dart around.  It's their flitting and swooping that has inspired the Swallow quilt I'm working on.

They were all puffed up with the cold.  I think Swallows migrate in Winter to warmer climates in other parts of the world, but not in NZ.  They self-introduced themselves from Australia in the 1950's and feed on flying insects.

Hopefully they've found somewhere warm to roost.  It's time for me to cuddle up next to the fire with my book.