Sew Sister Blogathon Canada 2014 hits the Atlantic!

Welcome Blogathon readers!! This week Sew Sisters is celebrating Canadian quilters!

This week is the third Blogathon Canada sponsored by Sew Sisters, a brick and mortar quilt shop located in Toronto, Ontario. I have ordered fabric online from Sew Sisters and found them to be very prompt and efficient. I really enjoy how they wrap all fabric securely in plastic before they box it up to mail. It is great service because this is how Canada Post handles parcels being delivered to me: if it is raining or snowing, parcels are left it in the middle of my driveway and if the sun is shining, parcels are bent and folded and shoved into the mailbox..Fortunately fabric is forgiving!

There are two Maritime hosts today, and both happen to be Linda's! There is Nova Scotia's Linda at Scrapmaster and New Brunswick's Linda at Stitch Lines. Check both of Linda’s blogs out for lots more East Coast bloggers and be sure to comment on both their posts - Sew Sisters has generously provided some great prizes! Thanks Sew Sisters!!

I refer to myself as a "person of fibre"..I love it in its many forms and love working with it any way I can. I quilt, I paint fabric, I surface dye it, I have sewn lots and lots of clothing and household items over the years, I have built costumes for the stage, I can weave and felt, I knit, I can crochet. Breathing does become an issue around sheep (and horses, too, but that's irrelevant here) so I sold my spinning wheel early on in my weaving/spinning career.

As well, I am a sign painter. Hence the name of my blog, Sister of the brush. Sign painting tended to be a predominately male occupation for many years and when I studied at George Brown College (yes, there are legitimate sign writing courses...), we were told the secret to running a successful business was a supportive wife. A wife. No, they never said, supportive husband, spouse, partner, it was wife..Well, that left me and other females in our class high and dry, so it was there and then that we dubbed ourselves, Sisters of the Brush and swore to be our own support system!

I still love wielding a brush. And I incorporate paint and fabric all the time. Painting fabric is soooo much fun! I especially like low immersion dyeing, discharging, sun printing and soy batik and combinations of all techniques!

I am also a longarm quilter. I use pantographs to quilt edge to edge designs, but especially enjoy quilting my own designs.

Thanks for visiting and welcome as always to my regular audience! I appreciate you taking the time to see what I am up to, what I am currently ranting about or seeing what photos I am sharing. Please continue to comment and if you have any issues doing so, please email me. My address is available via my profile which can be found on my sidebar.

Even More Sun Printing!

I can’t seem to get enough of making sun prints! A little walk along my favorite beach yielded a nice size bag of gull feathers to use in creating more fabric this way.

In order to make the feathers lie flat on the fabric, I had to snap the quill, or shaft, in two or three places along the length. Even so, they balanced precariously in some spots.

I know if I add paint to the fabric, brushing over the feathers, they will stay in place a bit better. But, once I have painted my fabric, I hate to muck up my design and coloring, so I hesitate to do that. So, I snapped and pressed and tried to will the wind away. The feathers stayed down quite well on my first pieces, and I wandered off to do other things.

While I disappeared, a breeze started blowing and jostled some of the placements on the second batch. Once the fabric is dry, the opportunity for printing is lost, so they didn’t turn out quite as I had planned.

But, I liked the subtlety of the design and since these are only the first layer of many in my quest for complex cloth, I know I can work with the results. 

Today I am linking up to The Needle and Thread Network. 

More Sun Prints

After a string of wet, rainy days, the sun popped out and I hurried to make the most of it. There was a wash on the line, some biscuits baked in my outdoor oven and a few more sun prints completed. 

 Creating these fabrics is addictive. 

Close up

Close up                                                                        

Painting Fabric and More

When you consider my many years of working with fibre, my two years of longarming is not a big number and my textile interests are wide and varied. So, when we chose classes at Road to California with our focus on quilting, I still was most certainly not passing up the opportunity to take a class that involved paint and brush! I have been a fan of Mickey Lawler and her fabric painting technique for a very long time, so the chance to spend a day with her was the icing on the cake, so to speak, for me.

Mickey demonstrates one of her techniques

Even though she suffered a painful injury on the first day at Road, Mickey was delightful! She was very organized and informative, the class was fast paced, and best of all, Mickey is funny! She had us laughing over and over as she recounted personal anecdotes, all the while showing us new and creative ways to paint our fabric.

Mickey’s beautiful work

Mickey’s color chart

Mickey's class was on the last day of Road and after a full week, Lorette and I had new places to go and familiar to us people to meet, so we packed up quickly and set off as soon as the class was done. My hubby had just flown into the busy LAX and while I painted, was picking up this fun Escapevan for our next weeks journey.

We were amazed by how many thumbs up we got as we travelled in our van!

We hit the road and headed out, and the next day my freshly painted, damp fabric got to dry at the Joshua Tree National Park.

The days were wonderfully hot, the nights surprisingly cold and the area incredibly interesting!

This man always keeps me laughing!

Cholla Cactus

After what was already feeling like a long winter back home, the heat of the desert was so inviting and welcome to us. 

Octillo

We basked in our surroundings and marvelled at the views, especially enjoying the sunsets. 

Sun setting over Joshua Tree National Park

We often meet interesting people when we travel. After a night in the Anza-Borrego Desert and while hiking one of the trails, we crossed paths with a lovely couple from Washington, DC who are sheep farmers. She is a spinner and weaver and we ended up having a lovely chat about fibres as we stood in the middle of the path under the hot desert sun. I love that my travels randomly put me in contact with so many people with common interests. I think the key is to be open to the possibility and to wear a welcoming smile.

SAQA 2104 Anniversary Trunk Show piece

Getting projects completed makes anybody feel good. I love seeing a project through to completion and when I get another one checked off my list, well, yahoo for me!

I am working very diligently at revamping my approach to shows and exhibitions. My new attitude is basically, why not? I have no burning desire to compete, but I am also feeling it is okay to be included. So, when the call came out for the SAQA 2104 Anniversary Trunk Show and our Regional Rep reminded us that we should all be involved, I made a concerted effort to get a piece done. Besides, the piece is only 7 x 10; I could fit that into an already overfull schedule. Why not?

So, I created my little art quilt using another little sketch I had waiting for the time I needed to get it onto fabric. It is painted, fused and beaded following the same procedure I outlined in my last post. A recent purchase of a WHOLE ROLL of Mistyfuse..be still my heart!...is going to make working on pieces such as this an absolute dream. New beading needles and thread are also going to help. 

I mailed my piece off and as I did, I got thinking about how maybe I did need a new word or phrase as guidance for my year. Maybe I do need a controlling factor to my days. So, I think I have found it...why not? Why not indeed!

I'll let you know how it goes..

My piece for the SAQA Atlantic Trunk Show

The SAQA Atlantic group has a travelling trunk show and each member is invited to include a piece representative of their work for inclusion. Completing a piece has been on my to do list for far too long and last week I set out to finally get mine done! I had a little sketch from way, way back in mind to use, and to be honest, it was an absolute pleasure to finally see my idea "materialize".

I like to use fabrics I create myself in my personal pieces. Using a combination of Seta opaque and transparent paints as well as Jacquard metallics, I happily painted white cotton yardage, creating a palette of fabrics to work with. Sparkle was added to the snow, water and sky pieces with some brush strokes of glitter fabric paint.

When I build a piece like this, I use a fusible webbing ironed to the back of the fabrics. Then I cut each piece, adhere them to a base and press them with a hot iron. Straight stitching further secures the layers together. Any time I can add embellishments is a plus in my books and this piece has some beads. The edges are left unfinished because it will be mounted between two layers of mat board and slipped into a clear plastic sleeve. Finished measurements are 8 x 8 inches.

The scene I have created is one my family and some close friends will recognize as Cook’s Cove, PEI. The land there is ever changing and I have taken some liberties in my interpretation, but to me it is a view forever on my mind..

Covering journals

I like my journals covered, and it turns out there was a simple way to achieve that without taking a huge chunk of time. These days it takes a while for the lightbulb to pop on inside my head and I would like to think it is simply because I am so busy that the obvious just isn’t obvious. But, really I believe that little voice of reason and sensible solutions has been silenced and left me to figure this stuff out on my own.

While working on something else and pondering how I could make some covers, I glanced at a stack of discharged and batiked fabric on my shelf and suddenly was struck by the idea that perhaps the fabric in itself was enough.

Turns out I was right.

The small journal is covered in a piece of black cotton discharged with bleach which I squirted out of a repurposed mustard bottle. The other was covered with fabric made with a black cotton base on which I freehanded leaves with soy wax and then painted with multiple colors of opaque fabric paint. Once dried I removed the wax to reveal the black outline. This requires a fair amount of elbow grease as the wax is well covered in paint. This results in a fabric with a fair amount of weight which is exactly what I wanted - a fabric with the substance of a suede or leather. I also used some red had dyed fabric for the inner pockets.

Done and done!

Coasting along nicely

I took the starfish pieces I stamped last week and made my sweet Simone some simple coasters. She will have 6 semi-matchy ones stamped on a dark blue fabric and one odd ball stamped on a lighter blue fabric. I am guessing perhaps she can used the oddball for her tea mug when she starts work.

The fabric they are shown on is another piece I dyed. It is from my snow dyeing attempts this past winter. 

I have soooo much thread, yet I don’t have a lot of metallic threads for my domestic. I did manage to find some blue and gold though and did some simple quilting which adds builds on the shine of the metallic fabric paint I used for stamping.

The hand dyed fabrics sandwich some fusible timtex which helps them keep their shape and adds an extra layer for protection against dampness.

Hope she likes them! Surprise, Mony!

Cleaning makes me a little bit owlie

I had nothing but great intentions and a very long list when Friday arrived. I had the house to myself for the weekend and that usually means a very loose meal plan and lots of chick/artsy TV (total confession! I love LA Ink, NY Ink and Pimp My Ride!) as a background to whatever it is I am working on. That kind of schedule and environment gives me lots of time to get my “stuff" done!

After a busy day and armed with yummy beverages, I made a direct path to my longarm. I worked steadily and finished a quilt that had been on much longer than I anticipated. Tired and happy with my progress, I proceeded to fall asleep on the couch cuddling my bowl of popcorn aka supper.....

I still don’t know what happened Saturday. Early on I made my way to the kitchen for a hot cuppa and five hours later I was fully immersed in cleaning said kitchen. I never spring clean. Don’t get me wrong, I do clean. Just not on a regular basis, or following a schedule. My windows got cleaned when my Mom was here and gently suggested she and I should tackle them. Walls get washed when we paint them. Floors? You don’t want to know.

So. It’s clean now. I even sorted and re-organized my spices. This is big for me. I would clean for my Mom at the drop of a hat. For myself? Well, there is always something else that needs doing.

The thing with me is that once I start, the activity grows. I get an idea in my head and I can’t rest until it is done. Ideas I didn’t want to entertain were sneaking unbidden into my head. I started cleaning more of the house....sigh.

So, the weekend went by and granted, a lot of stuff round here sparkles now, but, I did finally manage to give my head a shake, move away from the scrub brushes and mops and back to my sewing machines. Finally I whipped up a couple of cushions for my son using his drawings. I have used my kids artwork in my quilting since they were able to hold pencils, so it feels really great to do this with current artwork! 

I printed the drawings on Jacquard fabric sheets, backed them with fusible interfacing and then added some borders. I found it fairly serendipitous that fabric I painted in the last few weeks was perfect as a border. 

Jacquard offers two methods for securing the color on their fabric sheets. You can rinse out the excess ink with cool water, or use Scotchgard spray to seal it. I tried both and the result is that the owl on the right is lighter in color. Next time I will just use the Scotchgard without rinsing.