Botanical Sketches

In the rush to get stuff finished for my big show a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t really get to take nice pix of my Botanical Sketches, and they didn’t even get their own post, which the really do deserve! The motif is one I’ve worked with on my Going Green Totes, Journals, and the Freshly Picked baby outfits, but they were all warm ups for these little art quilts. It was close to 2 years ago when I was inspired to sketchily stitch a sprig of leaves across an asymmetrical color block after seeing the work of Skinny LaMinx (an entire post devoted to how she inspires me is in the pipeline…). I loved it, and stuck it up on my design wall (of course, I should show you a picture of it, but it fell down a few months ago and Stirling ate it…)

Any old who, it ticked away in the back of my mind for awhile, but I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to construct the quilts, but in the meantime worked on my free motion sketching skills making the bags and journals. When I tried using Peltex in the quilt sandwich in this quilt, I knew I had the construction method I wanted, then it was a matter of finding the time, and Bob’s your Uncle, my Botanical Sketches series:

 

Here’s a movie of me stitching a Black Eyed Susan. This was one of the movies I had playing all weekend long in my booth. A common question was whether or not I marked on the fabric first – No, I do not. I mean for these to truly be sketches, to show that these are done by hand, with spontaneity.

I’ve finally got them listed in my Etsy shop. Pictures of the whole series are up on Flickr, but here are a few more, cause I love them so:

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Branch & Bird – The Final Reveal

Well, I’ve really had fun with this little series, and I hope it shows! I’ve had some great comments from y’all this week, so if you’d like to buy one or more of these little gems, make sure to read through to the end of the post, where there are details on how my blog readers get 1st dibs! (Look away then if a commercial offends you!)

I truly am a quilter at heart – I LOVE taking smaller units and composing them into larger pieces, over & over again. I also enjoy figuring out ways to mount my little art quilts to make them easy to display…what I did with these was quilt the details through the top, a layer of batting, and then a layer of peltex, something they use to stiffen baseball cap brims. The peltex adds a a bit more definition to the quilting, and makes the quilts stiff enough to stand propped up everywhere, and hang nice and flat. After the quilting is done, a layer of fabric on the back covers it up, then stitch on a hanging loop and fuse on a label:

I then had fun playing with them, coming up with all sorts of fun combinations…it was very hard to STOP!

All over the internet, people have little clotheslines with small bits of inspiration pinned to them. This is how I’ve been envisioning my little birds…and my friends, the vision in my head matches what I see!

 

While I was trying in vain to come up with an idea of how to show them off in a room setting, lovely Linda of a La Mode Stuff commented on how nice the would look over a headboard! Shazaam, perfect idea – thanks Linda!

So, if you need to see more birdies, I’ve had some fun putting together a gallery with Adobe Bridge. 

OK, commercial time, feel free to look away. A couple of folk have asked if they are going up in my Etsy shop. I’ve got a couple of big shows coming up, so no, they won’t be in my Etsy shop for awhile, BUT if you need to have one, or more…email me with your choices: Candy(at)CandiedFabrics(dot)com and we’ll arrange payment and shipping.

They’re $20 each, with 10% off the total purchase when you buy 3 or more. Shipping will be $4.75, and if you’d like I can throw in some hemp cord & mini clothespins for a couple of bucks too. I’d love for my faithful blog readers to have 1st pick!

Bird & Branch Gallery

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Navy Branch & Birds

Finally – here are the navy! I’ve been having great fun with photographing all the birds in all sorts of configurations…tune in tomorrow to see them!

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Chartreuse Branch & Bird

Here they are, the penultimate set of birdies!

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Plum Branch & Bird

Without further ado, I present the Plum Birdies:

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Gold Branch & Birds

1st, under the file of “Things my awesome husband does for me” is this:

He always supports my need for bigger, stronger, faster computing! He’s been adding oomph to my Franken Computer since last Christmas, and the final thing we needed was a faster video card. Well, the new one has outputs for 2 monitors, and ever since my awesome find of this huge new monitor floor model at Best Buy we’ve had an extra monitor kicking around, so it’s all hooked up. And now my computer doesn’t slow down when I’m asking photoshop to do awesome things!

Here’s another batch of birds, fresh off the ironing board:

I’m making more!

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Birds & Branches Progress

Just checking in with y’all to let you know my Birds & Branches are coming along – I’ve got 25 branches on 25 bases, now to add the birds!

Sorry for the blue cast on the pix…at least the fabric colors are pretty true…If I stop to set up my light box, I won’t get as much done, and right now…time is of the essence!

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Lots of Birds and Branches

Inspiration: from a Design Sponge Sneak Peak in the home Julie Murphy, the founder designer of Jack & Lulu

Sketch: Done at Yellowstone this summer.

 

Prototype: Done today!

Palette: Jewels

Shall I make more? YES! Watch this space!

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Well Travelled Pears

 

This quilt hands in the entry of my home, and always gets lots of attention from visiting friends, and  I love to tell the story about it!

Back when we lived in Ohio, I belonged to a large quilt guild, and we had what were called “splinter groups”, in our case it was a 12 person group we called the “Stress Knots”. We met once a month in a meeting house (so no one had to clean!) and once a year, it was your turn to prepare some sort of quilt like activity. In previous years I had showed the rest of my group how to dye fabric, or paper piece. My last turn to host was right before we moved to California, which was going to be quite a long car trip. I brought 20 pieces of hand dyed fabric and a pear block I had designed and printed off a bunch of copies onto freezer paper. I handed out the packets to my wonderful friends, and we all spent the next hour cutting out a pear, an accent and a leaf from freezer paper, ironed them onto the fabric and prepped them for freezer paper applique (wonderful explanation of that here).

Then we had a blast arranging the pears on the backgrounds and putting together 20 wonderful combinations. Once the block color distributions were figured out, each got it’s own ziplock bag. They all went into a bag with needles thread and scissors, and stayed in the front seat of my car as we drove the whole  family west to Redlands, CA. I only managed to get about 7 blocks done during the drive, it took me another year and a ha lf of “free time” to hand applique the rest of them, but it was finished in October of 2005 (thanks goodness I quilted this into the quilt or I never would have remembered that!)

This was my 1st (and LAST) large hand applique project, and is a wonderful memory of “the Quilter Ladies” (as my husband and kids called them) – dear friends back in Newark, Ohio!

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Chartreuse is the new neutral!

Okay, I never said I had a dull sense of color! It’s just when I was working on this quilt, it seemed like this lovely chartreuse I’ve dyed worked well with just about everything, and worked well at separating lots of the stronger colors. So, when choosing the color of thread to quilt in the ditch, I of course chose…chartreuse!

Anyway, I blogged about the inspiration and process of this quilt over at Robin’s over the weekend. I had way too much on my plate that weekend, but found that it provided some creative impetus to “git ‘er done”…well, almost done. The quilt sat on my wall for a day or 2, and I realized it needed more stripes/walkways around the outside edge. So, for better or worse, here’s the final quilt:

It still doesn’t have a name, but besides the label it’s done. And I need a daylight picture: the plum color is not as dark as it appears, and the blue is not as bright. What I love about it is that the colors are very different than what I’ve been working with lately – and I like them! Again, here’s the color palette I drew from Robin’s inspiration quilt:

I’ve got a folder filled with images whose color combination inspire me, I’m definitely going to go the next step and create a palette like I did above, it really helped me focus on what I was trying to achieve.

In interest of full disclosure…we bloggers are apt to show off our workspace at their best, me included. Any old who, here’s what it looked like during the making of this piece! YIKES!

The me of this moment doesn’t know how i can stand the chaos, but during the heat of the moment, I don’t mind it – what is a testament to the zone I CAN get into – the creating zone! YAY!

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