Little things

This has been a month of small victories – or should I say, no big triumphs! I’ve been enjoying making a whole bunch of little objects and pictures, while putting off starting on my next piece for the FifteenxFifteen quilt group, which will be on an ‘abstract’ theme (and I’m never quite sure what ‘abstract’ means).

But I’m getting ahead of myself, as my first victory in the last few weeks was my latest FifteenxFifteen quilt.  This is the first in a series of three which will use trees as their subject, but which use a pre-defined theme, in this case black & white. I started with white fabric and used a number of things to print the background (including broccoli and toilet roll tubes), before applying black felt for the tree trunk, and bunches of tiny hexagons using black and white fabric, for the foliage. 

My husband actually likes this one (hooray!!), so it must have turned out OK.

 

My next project was to finish off my latest piece for the long-ago-started Urban project. I started this piece a while ago and got side-tracked, but in my quest for something to put off thinking about the abstract challenge, I found it in my sewing basket and decided it was worth finishing. It is based on the shapes and patterns inside churches – a sort of ‘deconstructed’ church, I suppose! I like the finished product, so as always I wonder why I didn’t finish it at the start. Perhaps it’ll get me in the mood to carry on with this series.

I have also been busy completing a commission for a friend who provided me with a photo of her daughter’s house, to be depicted as one of my ‘scrappy pictures’ (made from fabric scraps, not a comment on the finished product!!). I struggled with it a bit, as my pictures are usually landscapes that come out of my head, but in this case I needed to get the proportions correct. Anyway, I used “Colour Catcher” laundry sheets for the roof, a printed page from an old book for the foreground, and fabric scraps for the rest. Note also the two cats that were added to complete the family picture (another first for me).

  

Then finally, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed tinkering with some little brooches. I needle-felted a load of different wool fibres onto a sheet of felt, cut it into circles, then set about hand embroidering each one with whatever threads and patterns the underlying textures and colours suggest  to me. This is something I can do while sitting comfortably in the evening, so it’s a sort of selfish little pleasure (though I don’t feel guilty about it at all!!).

I’ve got a few more of these to work on, so they should keep me good for a few more evenings. On the other hand, I need to stop avoiding ‘abstract’ and get on with the next quilt. Let’s see what wins out!

Joan