Play Day with the Fiber Divas

I meant to post these pictures a while ago. The Fiber Divas had a play day and tried gelatin monoprinting. We took the idea from the August/September 2009 Quilting Arts. Frances Holliday Alford, had an article about monoprinting.

To make the smaller monoprints, above, I cut the gel with a biscuit cutter.



We found that the monoprints came out really cool on black fabric.



This was a really fun project and could get really addicting!!! Before I knew it, I had a good size pile of monoprints. It was interesting to see how different each divas monoprints came out. Now, I just need to find some time to embellish these and decide what I am going to do with them.

To make these bigger round monoprints, I set up the gelatin in a 9" cake pan.

A Little of This and a Little of That

Here's a new piece that I 've finally finished. This is the first piece I started after getting home from the hospital. It has a lot of left over pieces from my Grab Bag Challenge bag.

Which reminds me, I need to take a picture of the quilt that Tomme Fent made me from my grab bag. I love the quilt she made. It brightened up my hospital room and my days there. Here is a picture of it on Tomme's blog. The pink piece on the bottom this quilt is a piece that I discharged last February after taking Painting 2 with Jane Balshaw. I wanted to do more with the discharging but didn't get to it before I ended up in the hospital. Need to find out where the paste got put while I was away.

Wednesday I went to the Belknap Mill Quilter's Guild to hear Karen Eckmeier talk. She's a great speaker and her quilts were gorgeous. This was our Fiber Divas meeting but only me, Anita and Lynn were able to make it. Wish everyone else could have made it but life got in the way.

I've been spending alot of time learning about diabetes. One of the side effects from my pancreatitis is that my pancreas is not producing as much insulin as it needs to soooo... I'm now giving myself insulin shots and learning a lot of new stuff. I've talked to the diabetes nurse at the hospital, have an appointment with the dietician and am attending some classes over the next few weeks. Giving myself the shots isn't as hard as I thought it would be. They don't hurt, I just don't like watching the needle go in.

We had a power outage for about 1 1/2 hours today. You don't realize how much you depend on electricity until you are without it. I kept telling myself oh, I'll do this or I'll do that and then realize no I can't because I need eletricity. Couldn't sew (don't have any hand projects started and didn't want to start a new one), couldn't make the cake I had planned on making. Would have done some fabric painting but the kids had a board game set up on the table where I paint. Ended up reading and doing some housework. As I walked through the house, I would flip on the lights and then remember the lights weren't working. Just something I do automatically. The wind must have knocked down a tree or something. Not long after the power went off, we heard a chainsaw going and the beeper from a truck backing up. Didn't bother to go investigate but it has been really windy today.

Fabric Fun

Here are some of the fabrics I made at the class with Jane Balshaw. This first one was using gutta resist. It would really take practice to get it so the paints don't bleed through the gutta lines. I would love to do more but don't think I will. My hand was really bothering me with squeezing the gutta out of the bottle. Because I do alot of cake decorating at work, I'm really aware of what bothers my hand.

This is a piece of painted shibori. The blue/green fabric was a piece I had painted. I added dark purple paint (looks black) when I did the shibori. I love the look.

This is another piece of shibori and a piece that I discharged with Jacquard Discharge Paste. When I was ironing out the shibori piece at home, I just happened to put it next to the discharge piece and loved how they looked. The discharge piece wasn't quilte the right red so I set out to see if I could make a similar piece to go with the shibori piece.

This is what I came up with. I just love how they look together. Now I just need to figure out what to do. I'm thinking some sort of collage so I can leave these pieces whole.

This is my work in progress for the round robin. It's all fused together, I just need to figure out how to add some highlights to the vases and add lines to the bottle to show the square corners. I'm using paper with a rectangle cut out to figure out how I want to crop the piece.
I'd better stop procrastinating with my blogging and start working on something befor I have to go to work at 1.

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!!