Journal Quilt #13

Silk fusion, machine and hand embroidery, embellishing.
8.5" x 11"

Today's Results

My play time today didn't result in any finished projects, just some pieces for future finished projects. First up is a piece of wool I wet felted. The colors are so rich in this piece, just wish the camera could pick up on them. I added some bits of silk fibers to this also for some added interest.


The next photo shows some flower petals I am preparing. If you get the magazine Cloth Paper Scissors, you'll notice in the recent issue a project to make fabric flowers. The Fiber Arts Friends group I belong to is doing a flower swap. We choose a color to make, I chose red. We then make a flower for each of the other swappers and in the end we'll each have a colorful bouquet.


The last photo shows some canvas panels I dyed for a handbag. It never fails...when the dyes are drying there are always some light spots that show up. I wish I knew why this happens, because sometimes it really bugs me. Anybody have an idea????

For Gunnel

Gunnel and I are swapping postcards, and this is the one I made for her. She's been making some fabulous cards recently that I've been oogling over and I asked her if she'd like to trade sometime. I can't wait to get the one she's sending me. I hope you like this one Gunnel.

Revealed

Sneak Peek

Well I haven't gotten a lot of things made recently. I am in the process of working on a small art quilt. I'm almost finished, just need to finish up the binding and attach a hanging sleeve. I'm going to tease you and not show the entire thing until it's totally finished, but here's a little peek.

Journal Quilt #12

Three people I know have had to recently face the trauma of sending their beloved pets to that wonderful place where all creatures romp and play. So needless to say, this has brought back memories of a beloved friend and companion that I miss dearly. Her name is Jill (aka...Jilly, Jilly Bee, and Jilly Bean). She came into my life in 2001, I watched her being born. She touched my heart in that way so many pets do, and we had a special connection. She was tragically taken from this world just before turning four. This week's journal quilt is a tribute to my Jilly.


The background of the journal quilt is a technique I learned from the book "Layers of Stitch". I also used metallic foil to create a couple of paw prints, they are a little hard to see as they glare a little.

The next photo is a small quilt page I received from Emmy. Emmy is my March FAF swap partner for our fabric page swap. My theme being "nature", Emmy did a fabulous job in her interpretation. The photo at the bottom shows the tag she made to go along with the quilt page and also she sent a brooch too. Thanks Emmy!



I would also like to thank everyone for your wonderful comments and wishes about my handbags appearing in Haute Handbags and about the face designs. Thank you! Your support means so much to me.

Announcing...

Faces by Terri

I've created four face designs that are now available for crafting with. You can purchase them at joggles.com. You can find them here. You have a choice of buying them on pre-treated fabric or high quality matte paper. They are 4" square. The fabric faces come with a free mini purse pattern compliments of Sue Bleiweiss.

The photo below shows some greeting cards that Sue Bleiweiss made with the paper faces. Don't they look great!

I'm So Excited!

In today's mail I received my complimentary copy of Haute Handbags Volume 2. My Go Girl Bags are in it...YAY! Except the magazine changed the name to "You Go Girl" Bags. Not sure why. This is a fabulous handbag issue. For those of you who are really into handbags, I think you'll really like it. I'm not sure if it's out on the newstands yet, as I had read it would be available on April 1.

Another Paper Quilt

Journal Quilt #11

This weeks journal quilt was an experiment. First the background. I had a piece of aquabond sitting around that I hadn't yet tried. So I cut a piece off and placed it on my table sticky side up. Then I took all my saved snippets of threads and arranged them over the sticky area. I then layed a piece of tulle over all. I free motion embroidered everything. I soaked it in warm water and let it dry. It was very pretty and colorful.

To create this piece, I layed the thread background on a piece of black wool felt. I adhered it with some wonder under. Then, using the needle felting attachment for my Bernina, I started creating flowers, stems, and leaves with some wool roving. I added in some silk fibers here and there for some highlights. I also did some hand embroidery on this piece.

More Tyvek

Today I painted more tyvek and heated it. I used some metallic paints on these pieces and they shimmer nicely.


Also over the course of maybe a week, I've added linings and zippers to more felted pouches. I've lost track of how many are done, how many need linings/zippers and how many are knitted. I keep knitting more of these. One of these days I'll take an inventory.

Tyvek Play Day

On Saturday, I went to Amy's house. She lives about 15 minutes away from me. Also there was a friend of Amy's named Jenny. We spent about 2 hours playing with tyvek. This was the first time for all of us. The first photo shows the pieces that Amy made. We mostly used the tyvek you get from envelopes from the post office. Amy mostly was painting her pieces with Lumiere metallic paints and Jacquard textile paints. The metallic ones turned out wonderful.


The next photo shows the pieces I made. I was painting mine with Dye-na-flow. I had watered down the dye-na-flow somewhat and on some of them I think I had watered too much as the colors were pretty pale. So then I started adding more layers of dye-na-flow to increase the color.


These pieces were made by Jenny. She was mostly using craft type acrylics. And she even tried some Shiva paintsticks (see the rainbow triangular piece). That piece didn't shrivel and bubble quite the same as some of the others, maybe the paintsticks did that, not sure.


We really enjoyed our play time. We had started out ironing the pieces, then moved on to using a heat gun. We found that the heat gun method really curled the pieces up and then they wouldn't lay flat....so to fix this, we started putting our tyvek under a teflon sheet so they would remain flat while applying the heat from the gun. One thing we like about this method, was that you could see better what was happening than when we used the iron. But we also noticed that we were burning more holes through our tyvek. Need to have more control over the heat and how close and long to hold it in one area.

On one piece, Amy tried laying out some angelina fibers under the tyvek piece before applying heat to see if they would bond together. They didn't, the angelina did become a flat sheet but it peeled right off.

Another thing we found is to be sure your paint is thoroughly dry before ironing. Those pieces were less than desirable. I came home with some ideas of things and products to try, so will try and show some more results over the next few days.

And I've also been doing quite good with doing a sketch every night before bed. Here are some of my drawings. Some of these I was looking at a magazine called Birds and Blooms. The first cat one, was from a photograph...and the rest are made up. You can see in the one with the girl holding the cat, I had trouble getting her head the right size...oh well.

Journal Quilt #10

Wow, ten journal quilts done this year so far. I am proud of myself for being able to keep up with doing one each week. I have found that I am enjoying trying out new ideas and techniques that I've seen in some of the magazines I get. I think I probably have enough magazine pages tagged with techniques to try to last me a couple of years....well maybe not that long.

I decided to create a landscape this week. I also was playing with some of the decorative stitches on my new machine. Enjoy!


I finished this piece Thursday night. It's a 12 x 12" paper quilt. It was a lot of fun to make. Remember the lime green paint on the paintbrush I showed before??? Well I was brushing paint on the background. The background is some fabric-paper I had created and blogged about a few posts ago. I ended up putting some gesso on it, I stamped bubble wrap images on it, and I dry-brushed a few different colors of paint on it. The flowers and leaves are all made from scrapbooking type papers.

My New Toy

Oh my gosh! How did I get along without this? This is THE COOLEST MACHINE. I spent 1.5 hours with my dealer learning about this machine and I think in the first half hour I knew it was mine. The BSR is going to be a wonderful tool. One thing that really impressed me with the BSR is there is two modes. For one of the modes, you simply just press a button and then you start moving your fabric, the faster you move the fabric the faster the machine stitches. The foot control is not even used in this mode. Now what really impressed me was when you slow down to make a direction change the stiching slows down too. On my old machine, I had to control the speed with my foot and I didn't always have the greatest coordination and I'd get a build up of stitches in corners. Not anymore.


My Bernina dealer gives 25% off on any accessories you purchase if you buy your machine from them. So, I went ahead and purchased the embellishing foot. I asked the dealer about some things I had heard about the motors getting worn out with the use of the embellishing foot. They told me using the embellishing foot is no different than doing free motion embroidery.

Once I had the machine set up, I attached the embellishing foot to give it a try. Remember the orange pice of felt from a couple posts or so ago? Well I cut a portion off of it and felted it to a piece of acrylic felt. This was way fun!

Next I pulled out my container of scrap yarns and fibers. I started felting them down and that was even more fun. I can tell that I'm really going to enjoy this.

Fruits of my Labor

Yesterday I said I would show you what I had created Monday evening. By this morning all was dry. And today I even made more.

Here is an assortment of fabrics that I dyed with Dye-na-flow. I used 4 different shades of green on these. If you enlarge the photo you can read what the fabrics are. The one with question marks, I forgot the name. It's sort of like a burlap, but yet I know that wasn't the name of it.

This photo shows my failed attempt at nuno felting. I basted 5 different lightweight fabrics together then did some felting. It didn't felt the way I was hoping it would. I think next time I'll use some scrim or gauze or maybe even cheesecloth. I'm going to try and use this piece in something though. Don't know what yet.

The next four pictures are silk fusion. The first one I did Monday night and the other three I did today. I'm not totally happy with these. I've seen silk fusion that other people have posted on their blogs and I feel like their pieces are more blended. Mine look like they are choppy in coloration. Is it because I'm using pre-dyed silk? Am I not laying the silk down correctly? Anybody? Another problem I had with working with the silk was, everytime I'd pull some strands out they would wrap around my hand. I think it was static cling causing this. It made it very hard to lay them down nicely.




And here is a photo of some lovely lime green paint on my paint brush. I'm trying something new and hopefully I can show you soon (if it turns out to my liking).

Mad Crafter at Work

Not mad, as in angry, just obsessed. I had to work today so I didn't get to play with all my toys as much as I'd have liked to. But this evening I got down and dirty and did a few things. However, I don't have photos to share with you until tomorrow, because everything is drying.

Last night while getting ready for bed, I remembered that one of my 2007 goals was to sketch more. Well, I guess I'm a little bit late getting started, but hey, what can I say! I did this in my sketch book with a pen, and yes I did it sitting right in bed. I keep my sketch book on my nightstand in case I get any brainstorm ideas suddenly. I've decided that I am only going to use a pen in this sketch book. Most of the time when I use a pencil, I'm so hung up on creating a perfect drawing (in my mind), that I'd be erasing all the areas I don't like and redrawing them. But I'm going to try and just sketch and learn to like what I draw the first time (or not). I think it might help with gaining more drawing confidence. Hopefully.

So here's my sketch....guess what, I rather like it.


Then, when I got home and looked through the mail, I found this. It's a lovely tyvek/embroidered postcard from Doreen. She blogged about it here and I commented on it and she suggested we do a swap. So I sent her a postcard (which I forgot to take a picture of, go figure), and she sent me her postcard. Thanks Doreen, I just love it! It's going up on my display wall, with all my other goodies.

Lots to Share Today

The first photo shows two postcards I received from Helen. She and I were partners in a texture ingredients swap. I sent her some goodies to make a postcard with and here is what she made me. She even made me a bonus card. Thanks Helen, they're both fabuous.

And I'm ashamed to say, but I thought I had already shared the next item with you. But after looking, I found I hadn't. I got this last month from Mags. She and I were partners in the FAF fabric page swap for February. My theme is nature and I love what she made me. You can read more about it on Mags' blog here.

Next up are two mini purses that Sue made with my faces. These are soooooo cute. One has a strap and the other has a clip.

This photo shows a piece of felt I made yesterday. This is the second piece I've made and I'm not happy with this one. I know why too. I didn't put enough layers of wool on it. It turned out too thin and there are holes in some spots. I guess you learn from your mistakes/experiences.

And here is my ever so helpful assistant giving her assessment of the piece.

Yep, I think she likes it.

This next item is a padfolio. Sue so kindly shared her pattern for this here. This is made with the first piece of felt I made. I like how this piece of felt turned out. I forgot to take pictures of it before I cut into it. Here is the front:

Here is the back:

And the inside:

Journal Quilt #9

For my journal quilt this week, I followed a technique I had seen in a back issue of Quilting Arts Magazine. I positioned silk flowers on a background fabric and then I overlayed a piece of tulle to hold everything down. The article said to use chiffon, but I didn't have a piece in the right colorway. I pinned everything really well, then free motion stitched. I had fun with this quilt. My floral arrangements may soon be missing a stem here and there.


Also today, I made a piece of felted fabric using a wet felting technique and wool roving. I am terrible at remembering to take pictures along the way and have already cut into it and started a project. I am hoping to show the completed item soon.