Moon Rocks Falling

     I'm continuing with the hand sewing project from the on-line class with Jude Hill on the Spirit Cloth website. I've sewn a bit of prose using a split stem stitch and added roots to the tree symbol. After I took this photo, I started to embroider a river. The river is going to wind around the quilt from rock to rock. So here's an update.

Falling rocks in progress

In between planning the next steps for this project, I've made two more wheelchair covers. I'll post those photos on a future post. And I'm working on an iPad cover. I may never post a photo of that. I'm not too talented with functional items.

I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can visit other art quilt blogs. Please make comments to let the artists know you stopped by.

Show Time

     Several posts ago, I wrote about focal point and how I fixed a compositional mistake. You can read about how I fixed it here. The resulting quilt, Beach Walk,  got juried into the show Florida in Fabric II at the Ruth Funk Center For Textile Arts in Melbourne, Florida. It's a wonderful gallery. The show runs from May 24 to August 23. I'm really happy about it, too, because the juror was Martha Sielman who is the executive director of  SAQA. She will be giving a gallery walk at 1 PM on May 24. If you are in the area, be sure to stop by.

Beach Walk

     My quilt, Rise, also got juried into a show. This show isn't a quilt show. It's a multimedia art show. I'm curious to see how many other fiber pieces there will be. The name of the show is Spectrum. It is at Gateway Center for the Arts in DeBary, Florida and runs from April 27 to June 5.

Rise

     Meanwhile, I've started hand-quilting my small piece from the on-line class I'm taking and I've started making two wheelchair covers and I've started a design for a large quilt with a rock cairn and a tree.
I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts to let them know you stopped by.

Moon Rocks

     I'm so loving the hand-stitching in my Spirit Cloth on line class. Since my last post, I added rocks that I monoprinted and then later added veins with paint. (Two of the rocks are from commercial fabrics.)  I sewed them on by needle-turned appliqué, which was new to me. Then, I needle-appliquéd a moon from fabric that I had printed on my printer. To represent a tree and get some complimentary color in there, I used a method of raw-edge appliqué from Jude Hill on some commercial silk fabric and on a fussy-cut leaf fabric.
     I left one of the blocks empty so that I could embroider some prose into it. Actually, I started doing that tonight. My husband left me alone for the evening so I cranked up my iTunes and set my playlist for female vocalists and I have several thousand songs there. It played Lena Horne, Sheryl Crow, Reba McEntire, Ane Brun, Maria, Taylor, Sarah McLachlan, Ella Fitzgerald, and so many others. I love how you can shuffle the songs on iTunes and get surprised by what comes up. Do you have favorite music you like to listen to while you sew? Here's a photo of the piece before the text got added. The white cloth at the bottom is where I'll be adding more fabric later.

Still in-process

So, I still have much embroidery to add, more fabric to add at the bottom, and things that I haven't yet thought of yet. It's turning into a story about rocks that have fallen from the moon and end up in a river.

I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can visit other art quilt blogs. Please leave comments on their blogs to let them know you stopped by.

Indigo Impression

     Now that I'm working slow for a bit, I'm taking an on-line class from Jude Hill at her site, Spirit Cloth. The class I'm taking is Spirit Cloth 101. It's all hand stitching and basically about making a sampler and I'm really enjoying it. I spent several days just reading through the posts on the class and watching the videos. Then I spent a week just thinking about what my theme would be for my sampler. And then it came to me. No surprise if you're a reader of my blog... Rocks. And Blue.
     I went through my bin of blue fabrics and found two pieces of indigo cotton that I had dyed with my ArtsEtc group many years ago and had only used a small portion of. I treasured this fabric and this project would be perfect for it. I found some commercial fabrics that went well with it and some oranges that would be good accents. Here are some fabrics that may get used.

Indigo with possible accent fabrics

     Then I monoprinted some fabrics in various grays in rock textures using a procedure I developed
to mimic having a moldy gelatin plate using a permanent gelatin plate. You can visit this older post to see the procedure here.
     Here's a photo of the fabrics I monoprinted.

Monoprints sitting on Marcia Derse fabric with
a previously painted rock on top

     Finally, I got busy and actually hand-pieced a nine patch. As I was sewing, I was thinking that I could machine stitch it so much faster. But then I would be missing out on the idea of spirit cloth so I got into the rhythm of the stitch and it went well. The next step was to do an invisible baste onto a thin cloth instead of batting to stabilize it and get it ready for the appliqué step to come.

Nine-patch basted onto its stabilizing cloth

     I have several ideas floating in my head of how to place the rocks, what accents to add, what to embroider, etc. But these things change one by one as the pieces get added and I see how one thing affects another. I'm linking this to Off The Wall Friday where you can find other art quilt blogs. Please make comments on their posts to let them know you stopped by.