well, it’s done…

… the ‘when will this ever be finished’ wall hanging for City & Guilds Patchwork & Quilting is now finished!

This was my first experiment using felt as the batting so it became an integral part of the design. The assessment was to make a piece using appliqu̩ techniques. It has three layers Рpainted silk organza, handmade felt, and painted silk pongee. The shadow appliqu̩ shapes are hand dyed cotton and hand painted silk, and the machine and hand quilting are in cotton.

I cut back the top layer of some of the shadow appliqué and machine quilted areas after quilting them. I finished the edges with buttonhole stitch and then needlefelted them to break down the stitches into the felt. The support is a piece of driftwood I found on the beach, and the work is 53cm x 78cm (or 76cm x 78cm if you include the wood).

applique hanging

applique detail

applique detail

applique detail

applique detail

weekend’s work

I’ve been painting some colour wheels for OCA Textiles 1 – they didn’t turn out quite as I expected, though. I was using Brusho inks and I don’t know if it was the way I mixed them but the lemon and the golden yellow were so similar in hue that I didn’t get all the variations I was expecting. I’ll have another go with some gouache paints. Then I spent a bit of time mixing tints and tones in acrylics and experimenting with mixing in touches of a complementary colour. I could do this kind of thing all day long – I just love it.

mixing colours

I’ve also been painting silk organza and pongee for my appliqué hanging for City and Guilds – one piece of each in reds, one in greens and one in purples. These are fronts and backs to go with these felts. The next stage is to machine quilt the three layers, incorporating shadow applique, then cut back into it to expose some of the felt. The organza will be the top layer.

silk

I found this picture on the camera as well – it’s the sky from my office window, one evening a few weeks ago when it wasn’t quite as wet as today!

Kendal sky

feltmaking today

I’ve been making felts for the wadding in my wall hanging. The red is prefelted, the green – well, it’s done and the colours are what I wanted but I used some alpaca fibre and it’s very fluffy – I think I’ll probably use it for something else and do another, but first I’ll get the purple made. The fleece is mostly merino, space-dyed by Jan Hicks, with some plain colours (maybe also merino) I got from Reticule here in Kendal, and a little pink and red fleece I still have from a workshop with Jenny Cowern many years ago.

felts.jpg

samples for hanging

I took advantage of the sunshine yesterday to make a felt sample outdoors, and spent most of this afternoon stitching it to sample ideas for my City and Guilds appliqué assessment – I wrote about the design in this post. I’ve changed my mind and gone down to two layers now and if I need a third (I’m not sure if this actually has to be technically a quilt), I’ll add it to the back – two layers on the front will obscure the felt layer more than I want. My roses have become more open as they just looked like blobs otherwise – not abstract roses – just blobs…

samples1.jpg

I’m expecting some silk gauze to arrive soon and hoping it may be a little more sheer than the silk in this sample, which is just some I had in roughly the right colours. I need to practise my machine stitching too as it’s ages since I’ve done any – I like freedom and a certain rawness – but only if it’s deliberate!