penny-studionotes-2

I'm back to working on the large quilt having to do with stones.  In my previous post on this quilt, I mentioned being unsatisfied with the composition of rectangles.  I have played some with that, but it's still unresolved.  I decided to work on another aspect, and come back to the composition later.  As indicated on the sketch of the quilt, I plan that some of the rectangles will contain some kind of images of stones.  This past week, I've done a number of trials, using all the surface design techniques I thought might yield the kind of gestural, abstracted image I'm thinking of.  Here are the results, with techniques listed below the image.  (The details about all this are as much for my own record as for other readers--feel free to skip over them!) ·        flour paste resist, drawn into and then discharged with Thiox ·        flour paste resist, drawn into and scraped with thick...

I'm at the early stages of planning a quilt that will be a wedding gift for one of my son's best friends.  He and his fiancée really like scarlet and gray, so I'll work with those colors.  I'll have a good deal of hand-dyed gray fabric left over when I'm done with my current quilt in progress, so it will be nice to use that in another quilt.  I'm thinking of a log cabin quilt.  Here are some early trials for blocks.  The first group of three below is made of "logs" that finish at 1.5", with the block 3 logs deep on each side out from the center.  The grays are my hand-dyed fabrics; the reds are commercial prints.  Here I'm comparing three different fabrics for the center square. light gray center white center black center Then I did another block using all hand-dyes, a light gray center, logs increased in size to 2", and only two logs deep out from the center.  (These are reds I had on hand; if I go with solids, I will dye reds wi...

Holiness  is now basted and the hand-quilting has begun.   Hand-basting on the floor took about a week.  Now that that's done, I can begin on the next quilt about stones.  I can only hand-quilt for about 30 minutes each day (to prevent injury to my hand,) so that gives me lots of time to work on another quilt. Here's a small sketch I did a while ago, a quilt that would include some drawings of stone shapes, probably done through scratching into flour-paste resist, but with other methods also possible (direct drawing with thickened dye, monoprint, discharge, etc.)  I was thinking of an arrangement of the stones that would recollect the way stones are lined up on a gravestone.  When I showed the sketch to a friend, she said it reminded her of the layout of a cemetery--all the better.  (Thanks Louise!) I'm thinking of this as a large quilt, about 70x80.  I redid the sketch, re-drawing to eliminate overlap in the rectangles, and then tried folding up ...