Recent goings on

Earlier this year I posted about a project I was doing with my daughter's elementary school class. For several months we dyed cotton using Procion MX dyes, including stamping with print paste, clamping, tying, and stitch resist dyeing. In all, the children created seven meters of brightly coloured cotton fabric one fat eighth at a time. I was amazed at some of the pieces that they made and the experience reinforced my notion that most children come equipped with an innate sense of colour and composition. In late Spring we gathered all of the dyed fabric together and the students decided to make one large quilt using their hand dyed fabrics. We mostly tied the quilt, which was about as much as this age group could handle. Although it was tempting, I resisted adding a whole lot of machine quilting as I wanted the finished quilt to be predominantly their own work. Below are some photos showing them putting the quilt together.

Making the quilt sandwich

Basting the quilt

Sewing on the binding.

These are are some of my favourite blocks:






And the finished article, which is 57 x 72 inches:




Besides finishing this project I've been busier than usual these past few weeks. Among other things there was my sister-in-law's 'big fat marathon wedding', which consisted of two tea ceremonies, a wedding in her home (what were they thinking?) and a huge reception in the evening. The poor girl was up at 5:30 in the morning on her wedding day to have her hair and make-up done in time for the first event of the morning. I swear, the person who thought of starting married life with a wedding was a true sadist. Below is a photo of my contribution to the gala affair: a small silk ring pillow that my sister-in-law requested I make in green and burgundy, a nice colour combination. She loves the look of low water immersion dyed fabric and I was happy to oblige. Note the classy rings.



A word about my participation in the Take if Further Challenge that SharonB is running this year. I have been away from the challenge goings on for most of last month and into this month. To be more precise, life got hectic and I've been away from the computer. I've started working on a large-ish quilt, based on May's concept and plan to have it finished by mid July. I know that doesn't really fit in with how Sharon is running the challenge so I hope that she'll humour me. I plan to manipulate and use a few digitized images of drawings that I've made recently in a drawing class, juxtapose these with other images and collage them together into a quilt which will address the question posed by May's concept: "What do you call yourself and why?" I'll post regular reports on my progress and in August I'll go back to working on smaller works for the monthly challenges again. In the meantime have a look at the challenge concept for June as well as some of the work that's being made [link][link].

I also want to state that I've decided to enter a few pieces into a juried exhibit. It's a biennial show called Fibreworks put on by Cambridge Galleries of Cambridge, Ontario. I have never entered work in a show, and for that matter, have never exhibited work anywhere. I have been told that Fibreworks is a cutting edge exhibition populated mostly with the work of very accomplished artists and for this reason I will be surprised if one of my pieces is juried into the show. However, I am looking forward to the experience. As a quilt artist and friend said when I told her I wanted to enter some pieces, "You have to start somewhere."