Happy November!

Today is The Endeavourers‘ final quarterly reveal of the year and our theme is ‘Circles and Squares’.

Sadly, I am fast going to wrack and ruin!

After having a bad cold and horrific cough for a month, I eventually visited a doctor, on Monday, who diagnosed bronchitis and prescribed antibiotics. Then, a couple of hours later, I did something to my back so I’m struggling to sit down or stand up, I can’t bend at all and I get excruciating spasms when I cough.

Fortunately, however, after missing last quarter’s deadline, I made sure to start on this theme as soon as I had posted my ‘Collage’ quilt and I finished it early.

I decided to use a collection of silk scraps and to carry on using the collage technique as I liked the effect of the small fused circles (and I would never have had time to piece or applique so many!)

I wanted to use only circles and squares but I also wanted it to be a picture of something, rather than entirely abstract. I think there are lots of possibilities but I eventually settled on a townscape and set about trying to make a design.

I originally intended to fill the entire piece with circles, then to quilt the squares by machine and finally to embellish the buildings with doors/windows etc using hand embroidery but, once I started fusing the silk, I started to feel that would be over complicated.

Indeed, by the time I had finished all the fusing, I liked the flat design so much I decided to leave it as based on a grid of circles and squares without actually stitching that grid and I opted to keep the whole thing really simple with the colour in the buildings and the texture (1/2″ straight line quilting) in the sky. I think you can tell how I made this piece from the photos but I basically ironed fusible web to the silk pieces and cut the shapes before removing the paer and ironing them onto the background following my paper design.

So all that has remained for me to do with this for the last two months was to put it in a frame. I assumed that would be the easy bit and I was only putting it off because I couldn’t decide whether to paint the frame gold or not.

But then I tried to take a photo!

This frame has plexi glass – a posh name, I believe for plastic! – and it is SO shiny. The best I could do was the picture below with it laying flat on table in a dark room…It also looks like it needs a good stretch so I will have to take it out and reassess how to display it but I’m really not able to bend about today so that will have to wait.

It’s disappointing that the photos are not showing the silks very well as they are quite luminous and beautiful in real life and I’m quite enthused to try some more fusing silk, perhaps adding embroidery next time…

I hope you are keeping fit and well and I very much recommend you visit The Endeavourers to see what others have made. This group is such an inspiration :)

Janine @ Rainbow Hare

(If you subscribe to my blog by email, firstly, thank you :) Secondly, I really recommend you view the web version because otherwise you end up with a random scramble of photos and I don’t know how to stop that happening).