Project ABC - D

D is for

DRAGON / DRACHE

The idea of Project ABC by Wortman is to post a photo each week starting with the letter A and going through the whole alphabet. As the project is in German but I am writing in English I try to find words/photos that start with the same letter in both languages.

You will find more photos here (the urls are in the comments section). 

Project ABC - C

I love this project! Thank you Wordman for initiating it. I woke up in the middle of the night and started to ponder which word starts with a C in English and in German. Chrysanthemum / Chrysantheme was all that came to my mind.

Then I looked at some of the pictures by other participants and there was the photo by Blaupause7 of Coral Beach on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. And then I remembered that I was at Australia's

Coral Coast

where I took pictures of blowholes. Powerful ocean swells force water through sea caves and up out of narrow holes in the rocks so that jets of water erupt into the air. These blowholes are a little bit north of Carnarvon and a little bit south of Coral Bay. So that makes four Cs. Even 5 if you count that this was a camping vacation.

You will find more photos here (the urls are in the comments section). 

Project ABC - A and B

I just discovered the project ABC on the German blog Wortman. The idea is to post a photo each week starting with the letter A and going through the whole alphabet. As the project is in German but I am writing in English I try to find words/photos that start with the same letter in both languages (so you can learn a little German at the side😉). And as the project started 2 weeks ago I will show the first two pictures today.

Week 1 - A

A is for Artichoke / Artischocke

Week 2 - B

B is for Boat / Boot

You can find more pictures of the project here but it's a little complicated as you have to click on the links in the comments.

Art Quilt Challenge #1

Do you know the Art Quilt Challenge Group on Facebook? No? You should! It's a rather new group founded by Carol McDowell of quiltedfabricart.blogspot.com and is ment to challenge quilters to make a quilt to a given theme.

The deadline for a challenge is every other month. End of December (yes I know, but better late than never) called for a quilt with the theme "Banned Books".

I live in Austria and we don't have a lot of banned books nowadays but in our not too far away history books weren't only banned but burnt.

So for my quilt I decided to combine banned and burnt books. The stack starts at the top with some books banned in the US and goes down to books burnt by the Nazis. All the books are stacked on a bonfire which is alreday burning. The title of my quilt is

IT'S A SMALL STEP FROM BANNED TO BURNT

The quilt is really small (approx. 8 x 12 inches / 20 x 30 cm) and still it was a real challenge for me with lots of first times.

I started with perusing my bookshelves and decided to use the following books (from the bottom up):
a book by Erich Kästner, a German author, nowadays mostly loved for his children books
a book by Bertolt Brecht - all the books from this German author were burnt
"Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury - burnt and today still banned in some places
a book by Kurt Tucholsky - all of his books were burnt
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain - a banned book I love
"To kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee - banned
"1984" by George Orwell - banned

The first thing to do was to take a photo.

I loaded the photo onto my computer and by using Photoshop I created a new background for the books - a dark blue with some texture to resemble fabric. Then I "painted" some logs under the books which looked rather abstract at that time.

I printed the final picture onto fabric. A first one for me. It took some fabric sheets before I realized that I have to print it upside down so that I don't loose the logs at the bottom of the picture to the margins of my printer.

With basting spray I glued top, batting and backing together. This was also a first one as I usually don't use this spray. But I was afraid of getting holes in the print when basting or pin-basting.

I quilted around each book with invisible thred. Another first one. I never used this thread before. So I read about it on the Internet - everyone telling me that this might produce some problems with tension and with needles and with broken thread and so on. So I quit reading and just started to quilt - usual needle, usual tension - no problems at all.

Then I quilted the logs and quilted some bark texture into them.

Afterwards I quilted the flames with a variegated yellow-orange thread, a little bit thicker than my usual thread.

This is the first time that I quilted a whole quilt (although really small) by machine. I did discover that I have a wonderful sewing foot for quilting. It is meant for satin stichting my manual tells me but it's see-through plastic and has a wide opening at the front - just perfect.

It took me some time to figure out in which way to bind the quilt. I did not want to make a border as I was afraid of using my iron on the printed surface. I pondered a satin stitched finish for some time but I don't like them. In the end I sewed a small strip (about 1 inch) to the quilt and brought it completely to the background where I sewed it down by hand.

To be honest I am proud of my quilt because I gave it such a lot of thoughts and really went out of my comfort zone when constructing it.

Now off to the new challenge. Think about joining us - it really is a lot of fun!

I'm linking this to Off the Wall Friday.

What a beautiful day!

I think today was the most beautiful day of this year. 

There was still fresh snow in the woods and the sun was shining - 

thus creating a glittering and sparkling winter wonderland. 

Snow Dyeing

Snow in Vienna! This is rather rare. But at the moment we do have some snow and I seized the opportunity to snow-dye (is this a word?) some fabric.

I cut my fabric into fat quarters and soaked it in a soda ash solution.

Then I put the fat quarters into individual containers. I folded some of them and simply scrunched the rest.

I gathered some buckets of snow on my balcony

and covered the fabric with it.

Then I sprinckled some dye onto the snow (I use Procion). I used way too much dye - next time I will be more careful. This all happened in my bathtub.

I put the containers in garbage bags and put them out on my balcony. The advantage - the whole thing was out of the way. The disadvantage (which might have been solved with a little bit of thinking in advance) - the snow did not melt. So after a few hours I put the bags inside.

The next day I visited my aunt and only got home in the evening. The snow on the fabric was gone and the water with the dye covered the bottom of the containers. So the fabric did soak up the colors from the bottom for a few hours which diminished the effect of the snow dyeing.

But after a lot of rinsing, some washing and ironing I got these beautiful pieces of fabric. I really love them.

In fact I like the colors so much that I couldn't throw away the threads that unraveled from the fabrics.

As the weather report promises some more snow in the next days I will probably start another snow dyeing session but this time I will put the fabric on a grill so that the melted snow can run through the fabric. I'm really looking forward to it.

I'm linking this post to Nina-Marie's "Off the Wall Friday". 

Happy New Year

A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OF YOU!

After having a really lousy 2018 it can only get better. So I am looking forward to 2019. And to more quilting, to more creativity, to more organizsation and to more blog writing. I will meet you all here.