Tag: ART QUILT

Time and Tide…

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Time and tide waits for no man…

Have you tried something new this month and linked  up with Fiona at Celtic Thistle Stitches?

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I have been trying out Pebeo Setacolor Opaque fabric paints. I came upon this after googling in search of gold fabric paint for a project which must remain secret for a little while. I found the gold very easy to work with and I was delighted with the results. The line below is 1/4″ wide and I’m sure it would have have taken me much longer to applique and would have been much more cumbersome.

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In case you are tempted to try it out, here is a quick ‘how to’.

  1. Iron a piece of freezer paper onto the back of your fabric.
  2. Either paint freehand or draw an outline (I used a Frixon pen) and fill carefully with paint. You may need several layers. The gold, above, was one layer but the photo of the white, below, was also taken after one layer, which was disappointing.
  3. When the paint is dry, remove the freezer paper and iron the BACK of your fabric for 5 minutes.

5. Layer your piece with wadding and backing fabric to make a ‘quilt sandwich’.

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6. Quilt as desired, as they say! I sewed around the outline of my shapes and then quilted straight lines in the background.

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The ‘Time and Tide’ block, unfortunately, didn’t go so well as the gold and purple one. I found the colours seemed less opaque and painting over them resulted in a more textured effect than I wanted (perhaps something that a softer brush might help). Also, the presser foot kept sticking on the painted areas and I’m not sure if that was because the paint was thicker (more layers) or whether it was the fabric or thread. I wonder if a teflon foot might help as I imagine it’s quite similar to sewing vinyl, which I’ve never tried… I certainly think there are a lot of possibilities for integrating this into quilts, though, and the colours, which are water based, are mixable and can also be be mixed with a special paint to give a pearlised effect so there many exciting possibilities I have yet to attempt :)

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I am linking this post with Fiona at Celtic Thistle Stitches for New to Me in 2017

Janine @ Rainbow Hare

The Greatest Show on Earth!

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Welcome to Rainbow Hare!

Today, for one post only, I would like to introduce to you: The Greatest Show on Earth!

I will speak of no circuses, no smoke and mirrors, no conjurer’s tricks (and absolutely no animation!).

Today, I would like to share with you the Awe, the Wonder, the Amazement, the MAGIC of ‘Light in the Darkness’.

Before we go any further, I should mention that this is not The Greatest Show on Earth. This is just a little piece of Quilt Theatre and it is my tribute to The Greatest Show on Earth – and my offering for today’s Four in Art reveal. Our theme for this year is ‘Light’ and the sub-theme for this quarter is ‘Light in the darkness’. Our aim, as always, is: “…to break out of the usual gridded experience and try a new concept, free of structure or preconception, moving the boundaries of our own skills forward in both concept and technique”.

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If you will bear with this eccentricity (for one post only), I will show this quilt as a slideshow as that seems to me to be the easiest way of displaying it (You may have to visit my actual post to see the slideshow as I don’t think it will show up in an email) and then share the inspiration behind this piece.

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The photo above is meant to show how I made flaps on the quilt and folded them over to reveal the pictures but it doesn’t do that very well :(

This quilt was inspired by Black Light Theatre, which I first encountered on a trip to Prague, where I had the wonderfully good fortune of seeing the The Wow Show. The person I was with thought it looked silly and was just something for children so, for the first time in my life, I went to the theatre by myself. When I say ‘theatre’, it was a shabby old building with peeling paint that reminded me of your average village hall and, as I sat waiting for it to begin, I did wonder if it really was going to be as good as I’d hoped. Then we were plunged into the darkest of darkness and it began and all at once we were transported into another world. A parallel universe of wondrous, beautiful, bizarre and delightful scenes where any expectation was simultaneously surpassed and confounded. Where expectation itself became obsolete, being too much rooted in ordinary, mundane, everyday things.

And, unlike most ‘magic tricks’, which make us gasp in amazement but become entirely ordinary when we learn how they were done, I found knowing that the whole effect was caused by a particular way of costuming dancers and lighting the performance made the whole thing even more incredible! One day, I would love to see Aspects of Alice…Here is a clip.

I hope you have enjoyed these clips. If you have yet to experience Black Light Theatre in real life, I must tell tell you that wonderful as they are, they are the merest shadow of seeing this extraordinary art form live and, should you ever visit Prague (or anywhere else with similar performances) I would entreat you to visit and I’m quite sure you won’t be disappointed :D

In the meantime, please visit the other members of Four in Art and see their interpretations of this quarter’s theme.

Bette Ayers   Camilla Cathro   Catherine Chisholm

Elizabeth Eastmond   Nancy Myers   Rachel Riley   Simone Bradford

Janine @ Rainbow Hare

Purple Passion / Once upon a time…

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Do you love lavender?

Are you mad about mauve?

Today is the third reveal day for Four in Art  – an Art Quilt Group, which aims to:Screen Shot 2016-04-18 at 22.12.25

“…to break out of the usual gridded experience and try a new concept, free of structure or preconception, moving the boundaries of our own skills forward in both concept and technique”

And this quarter I really did intend to break out and move boundaries with something arty and sophisticated… But our general theme for 2016 is Colour and the sub-theme for this quarter is Purple Passion. To look at this beautiful collection of  fabrics I have somehow acquired over the years, you would think the theme ‘purple passion’ should be right up my street…

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To make a dress for when I’m old, perhaps?

…but actually it left me entirely at a loss. There have been a couple of times in my life when I have really liked purple but lately I seem to be right out of a purple phase and I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything purple that I felt passionate about.

I considered attempting something stylised in the way of a purple passion flower. It really is a stunning plant and there is an amazing variety to inspire on google images…

Or making some kind of illustration of the famous poem by Jenny Jones…

Uploaded on 4 Aug 2010, Jenny Joseph reads her poem ‘Warning’, Britain’s most popular post-war poem, according to poll conducted by the BBC in 1996. The second line of this poem inspired the formation of America’s Red Hat Society, the largest women’s social group in the world (which has over 70,000 members and almost 24,000 chapters in the US and 25 other countries) and encourages fun, friendship, freedom and fulfilment. Born in 1932, Jenny Joseph first published ‘Warning’ in 1961 in The Listener — when she was 29 — and later included it in her second collection, ROSE IN THE AFTERNOON (1974) and then in her SELECTED POEMS from Bloodaxe in 1992.

 

And time passed…

And the more I reflected on it the more I came to realise that if I had to choose a single thing I could really say has been my greatest passion throughout my life, it just has to be story. Whilst I love making things with fabric and yarn, I could live well enough without quilting or crochet but a world without stories seems to me like an unimaginably bleak and empty place. I wanted, however, to suggest story as an all encompassing category and not to include anything that would seem to signify any specific genre.

So the title of my quilt for this quarter is ‘Once upon a time…’ and a ‘story’, which follows is, I hope, indicated by the three circles (ellipses), which include words and a hint of illustration.

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