Saturday, October 20, 2012

Making Leaves

Several of our Fyber Cafe ladies attended a leaf making workshop for Sherry and Kay. Sherry's fiber group in Ketchican, Alaska has a grant to make a 17 foot fiber tree in the children's section of the new public library. They need thousands of leaves, so we spent the day painting and stamping on paper and layering with a stem and fabric backing.





They still need to be trimmed and coated with gloss medium, Sherry had samples of finished leaves for us to admire. We had a wonderful lunch and it was fun to make a mess with paints and help a wonderful cause.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

The White Album

As we are getting ready to put our Beatles Challenge pieces in the Sutherlin Library, an idea popped into my head. To stitch white on white, a picture of the four Beatles, and call it the white album. My supervisor at work, is a big Beatles fan and had several posters and pictures in her office. So I borrowed one that is a black and white silhouette style, traced it onto tracing paper and then onto white fabric. I used a red, heat disappearing pen to draw the pic, and free motion machine quilted it. I added lyrics and song titles around each head to add texture and fill in areas. It looked really strange with the red markings, and I was worried they would not come off. I wish I had taken a picture with the ink still on it. A quick hit with the hot iron and it instantly disappeared!! WOW, Magic!! I got the binding on and finished the sleeve, and had the whole thing finished in about 1 1/2 hours. The black and white picture is really good contrast and you can see how it really looks like them, not so much the outline only. It was difficult to photograph the white on white, I set it on my ironing board and put a small lamp, low so it was table level, casting as much shadow as possible. I had to lighten/whiten it up in photoshop cause it looked all creamy colored, like dark muslin.


We got quiet a few more pieces done for the challenge, so it will make a nice display at the library.