The TeaCup Quilt

I started writing this post a week ago, at which time I started it with the line, “Well August is upon us. How on earth did that happen!?”, and now we’re two weeks in. How on earth did THAT happen?!

Back in April we (read: our craft group) started working on a teacup quilt. It was one of those things where we loved this pretty tea party fabric, and wanted to make a wall hanging out of it, but it didn’t belong to a pattern we liked (or as far as were aware, any pattern at all).

So Nana set out to make her own pattern with the odd shaped sections of fabric we had. Lets just say that it has NOT been an easy task, hence it being August already, and we’ve not started it.

Last Tuesday at craft group we decided to bite the bullet and sacrifice parts of the fabric in order to easy the planning and quilt making process.

I think it’s going to work well once it’s all put together. We’ve divided the quilt into three sections, so tomorrow we plan on putting the first section together, and then I can start the embroidery for it as well.

This is going to make my list of quite big projects rather long… Hopefully I have them all finished by the end of the year!

Tags: planning, processpledge, quilt, Sewing, teacup, wall hanging

A Frock By Friday?!

Tags: dress, frockbyfriday, Sewing

Trees Art

The other day I started to new art projects, one is an embroidery, the other is a mixed media painting. They’re both esentially the same design- a large tree taking up most of the frame, and a swing hanging from a low branch.

This is probably the first time since Year 12 Art class that I used a visual journal to plan out what it would look like. At first I wasn’t too keen on it, but I remembered how important they were in high school, and persevered. I’m really happy with how things have progressed, and I’ve been able to problem solve it all out. I love problem solving.

Tree Embroidery.

I’ve always had this design in the back of my head. I’ve done other paintings like it before, but making this into embroidery meant it could have a bit of a different ‘feel’ about it. It could be much more detailed.I also started out with a size in mind, because I have a frame I want to put it into.

The hardest part was getting the leaves right. And I used up lots of pages just deciding on a leave pattern that worked. I wanted to give the effect of leaves, without embroidering them individually in a ‘traditional’ leaf shape.

Here I did one sketch with the semi-’traditional’ leaf look.

I wanted the leaves more ‘joined’ and flowing…

I felt like this was a bit too ‘messy’ so tried to go for more curls. I also tried to incorporate the curls into the trunk. I was using the same sort of style that the letters in my Christmas wall hanging were written in.

My design ended up like this (below). I scrapped the sunrise idea above, cause I thought it might be too complicated, and take away from the tree. It would be quite nice on its own though.;. The left side of this sketch is for the painting in the same pattern. Obviously that has a few different things to worry about, like more options for the background, and because it’s mixed media, what exactly I’ll use to print/paint/glue etc.

I ended up keeping each ‘leaf’ individual, but make them into spirals so that they got the curly look, but were a bit neater. Soon you’ll be able to seen that that idea has evolved a bit as I’ve been embroidering (when I show you my progress so far)!

I regret not taking more process shots of actually drawing it onto my fabric and what not. But I’ll learn for next time! Soon I’ll be able to show you how it looks on fabric, and the embroidery progress so far!

Tags: embroidery, painting, planning, tree art, trees, visual_journal