My Brain is Mush

I started working on a new piece today. I got alot done and I really want to keep working on it but my brain has quit working so I'm done. I wish I could post it here and get some opinions but it is my entry for the journal quilts.

I do have these pieces of fabric that I made. The smaller one on the bottom was made last week. I thought I was going to use that fabric design as part of my journal quilt and made this bigger piece with the gold leaves. I also monoprinted and painted a bunch of other fabrics and when I was playing around with them I ended up likeing the way some other pieces were comeing together better.
The piece I'm working on for my journal quilt is completely out of my usual color palette and style but I really like the way it is looking. We'll see what I think tomorrow when my brain is not mush!!

I really like this piece of fabric. I'll just have to think of something to do with it.

Guess I forgot to crop this one. Oh, well!!

Housework? What Housework??

I spent most of this afternoon, making monoprints and painting fabric instead of doing housework. Since I liked the way my stamps came out the other day, I made these stamps out of Fun Foam and styrofoam meat trays today. I haven't used them on the fabric I painted but I did try them out on another piece I started the other day. I just wanted to see what they looked like.

I really like how easy it is to make the stamps with the fun foam. I don't have any pictures of the fabric I made today. I'm waiting until I get the stamping done. Maybe Monday when I have another day off. Maybe I'll skip housework that day too!!!

GeriAnn - This Post is for You!

The quilt art group I'm in, met yesterday. We had a good time, as usual. This was our second exchange of our round robin books. GeriAnn, lives in Massachusetts and is part of our exchange, so I'm posting all our books so she can have the fun of seeing them each time.

This first one, is Lynn Elkinton's book. Her theme is SKY. This is her cover and her page for the book.

This is Marilyn's page for the book. I just love the colors in this! Marilyn used a piece of Micki Lawler's fabric for the sky.

This is what Marilyn did to the back of her sky page. I have the sky book to work on the next 2 weeks. Don't know what I'm going to do yet.

This next one, is Carmen's book, In The Woods. I mixed up the pictures. The first one is Lynn's page. She used her Embellisher to make the picture of the chipmunk.

This is Carmen's page for her book

This is GeriAnn's page for her book, Art Paper Dolls.

Carmen's page for GeriAnn's book.

This is Marilyn's page for her book, Techniques. I forget exactly how she made this. I think it's a print from a transparency that she made in a class.
Finally, this is mine for Marilyn's book, which I've already shown in the last post.

Round Robin Book Page

Today I worked on my page for Marilyn's round robin book. Her theme is techniques. I took a piece of fabric that I had sponge painted with blue and then painted over with a green wash. Then I stamped on the checkerboards and on top of that I stamped on the leaves. I machine stitched the outline of the leaves and the veins.
Since I didn't have stencils or stamps of the shapes I wanted, I made my own stamps. For the checkerboards, I took foam shapes with sticky tape on the back and stuck them onto a styrofoam meat tray in the pattern I wanted. For the leaves, I cut the shape out of a styrofoam meat tray and made the lines for the veins with a pen.
These were fun new techniques to try. I would like to do more surface design on my fabrics.
I just need to learn to let go and not over think things too much. Have more fun and not worry about making mistakes or ruining a piece of cloth.

I didn't even think. I should have taken a picture of another piece I worked on today that started with a monoprint of some leaves. The monoprint was fun to do. I need (or should I say want) to play around with more monoprinting.

One could get caught up in Painting, dyeing and playing with making your own fabric that you don't get anything made from it!!

Postcards

I finally finished the 5 postcards for the swap I'm in. I had a really big block and finally went to my scrap bag and started pulling pieces out. Once I started pulling pieces out, they started going together fairly easy. I did end up falling back on my leaf shapes. Oh, well, I like leaves.

Round Robin Page

This is the page I made for my round robin book. I decided to go with a nature theme. This is more abstract than anything that I've done before. For inspiration, I used the woods around our house. Our yard is surounded by woods and we don't have grass but there are areas that are greener. We also have old stumps that are rotting away where we cut down trees to make a clearing around the house. I used pieces of birch bark to represent these trees.
My daughter, Kara, found a huge piece of birch bark on the ground in the woods. I've used pieces of it in a couple of projects now.
Friday is our art quilt group. Can't wait to see what everyone else has done and what they have picked for their themes. I just need to find something to put this in so the pieces don't get lost in all the exchanges.

Projects On Hold

I haven't had time to work on this flower piece lately or the soy silk landscape.
On this piece, I did get the flowers and leaves fused down and machine stitched. I have started to add some hand embroidered flowers.
On the landscape, I added some cheesecloth and a tree. I don't have a picture of that yet.

Here is a close-up of the flowers.

Instead of working on these lately, I've had to work on a couple of projects that have deadlines coming up. One is a round robin book for my art quilt group. We decided to do a book for our round robin this year. each of us has to decide on a theme, size and format for our book. For this first meeting we have to have the page for our own book done. We decided to do either a folded type of book or a scroll type of book so that we would be able to display them at our next exhibit (where ever or when ever that will be). I'm not done with my page, so I don't have a picture yet. I decided to do a nature themed and my pages are 9"h x 6"w. I cut out pieces of peltex for everyone to use so that the pages will be stiff enough to stand up when I put it together. I'm doing the folded book but I'm not exactly sure how I will put it all together. I'll deal with that later.

I also have to get 5 postcards done by the 15 for the exchange I'm in.

This time of year I usually have more time to work on my projects since work is slow but this year my manager has been able to give me 40 hours a week. Shouldn't complain since I really do need the extra hours!

Bonnie McCaffery has a new VidCast on the New Zealand Quilt Symposium 2007. It is really good. I love seeing what quilters are doing in other countries and quilts from Australia and New Zealand always seem to catch my eye.