The Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Composite is Here!

Ok, admit it, how many still have that song stuck in your brain?

Sorry about that, but it is a cute melody.  And one you can “reflect” on while you consider your next challenge. (Sorry, I just couldn’t resist!)

Eleven quilts this time and we look forward to seeing Karen and Andrea in our next reflections; ditto last sentence above.  We'll also look forward to seeing our latest members' quilts, those of Candace and Teresa!  Two more Arkansas artists! Fifteen quilts, wow!  That is going to be fun!

Row one is a great illustration of how creativity works. The brain thinks of umbrellas; the creative brain sees different images, and the results make a beautiful row.

Row two sees “super-cali-fragilistic,” “splendid, above, beauty, delicate”.  In one word: flowers.

Row three portrays babies, kids, grandkids, carousels.  Need I say more?

Row four. A ladies purse is a pure mystery to me. Rita will tell me, “Well, it’s in my purse, just get it.” I plead the 5^th; no way am I getting in that 20 pound shoulder suit-case. Thank you for the very pleasant trip down memory lane Tricia: many years ago I built my daughter a doll house and purchased many such doll house accessories such as the one you used.  And you can fly away over Kathy’s magic flower garden, humming Mary Poppins' tune to your heart’s content. Just try to get it out of your.....oh, go ahead, whistle while you stitch!

To everyone, as usual, a job well done!

Note from Alice:  Rita and Randy, like several others (!!!), are continuing to have issues with Blogger and with posting what they want to post.  So that's why I am posting this for Randy!

Kathy's Supercalifragilistic .......

Greetings to all the Material Mavens ....those who have been with us since the beginning, those who are still sort-of new, and those who are brand new !

One of the first thoughts that came to me with Rita's challenge, was a vague memory (or perhaps imagination !) of Mary Poppins flying about, over, and through a hugely large number of beautiful flowers.   These flowers, of course, made even more beautiful because of her 'magic!'

My 12" x 12" quilt is composed of 80+ flowers (well.... make that 160+ flowers since each flower is two-sided, with a different fabric on each side).     Each flower was machine stitched onto a 'traditional English-garden' theme backing fabric, plus Warm and Natural batting.   A more contemporary 'funky' type fabric was used for the backing

After getting all these pieces / parts assembled, I partially 'sliced' each flower into 8 or more 'petals,' spritzed the whole quilt with water, and thew it into a hot dryer to fluff up all those petals !     

My quilt is a funky, quirky rendition of the beautiful garden I remember from seeing Julie Andrews (aka Mary Poppins) flying over on one of her many journeys !

Peace & blessings,     Kathy

Judy's Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Sunflower

Truly a puzzle for me. It is like a magic word that embodies so many incredible possibilities. 

I found this sunflower block that I made many moons ago. That made me think of how wonderful, fragile, strong, and beautiful they are. Even when they are dry and ready to feed the birds they are still beautiful to me.

The commercial piece that has the sunflowers printed on it was given to me by a special friend. She is also wonderful, fragile, strong, and beautiful. Love you!

The pieced side I chose to do echo quilting with straight lines. The commercial fabric I quilted the soft lines of the flower and leaves.

The quilting makes a pretty picture on the back.

Alice's "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" Quilt: Take Your Pick, Mary Poppins!

Of course the word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” makes me immediately think of Mary Poppins and the wonderful film by that name, starring the multi-talented Julie Andrews.  But my history with Mary Poppins goes back further than 1964, when the movie came out.  As a child, I was as voracious a reader as I am now.  I adored all of the Mary Poppins books by P. L. Travers and read them all, some of them several times.

Pondering our theme word and what sort of quilt to design, the image that stubbornly kept popping into my head was that of Mary Poppins floating down from the sky, holding onto an umbrella.  That image would not go away, and rather than fighting it, I decided to feature umbrellas.  What about a collection of colorful umbrellas?  Sort of an umbrellas collage?

I had a piece of hand-painted fabric created before this group started.  I had sprinkled the pale blue-gray with rock salt, just to see what happened as it dried in the sun.  The salt left marks that reminded me of raindrops, so luckily, I found this fabric in my stash, and that became the background.

I wanted one umbrella to be portrayed in a bird’s eye view, so it was the one I cut out first from fabrics to which I had applied Wonder Under.  The other four were then cut out, and eventually I arranged them all on the raindrop background.  Buttons from the collection I bought once at a junk store are used for the knobs on the top of the umbrellas.

I quilted this, in part, by echo quilting around each shape.  I appliqued the various sections of the umbrellas down with a variety of stitches, which did double-duty for more quilting and for securing the umbrellas.   I fused the binding down around this 12”x12” quilt.  I couldn’t come up with a name for a long time, but finally settled on “Take Your Pick, Mary Poppins!”

Rita’s Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: Blue and Beaded

[Note:  Alice is posting for Rita, who continues to have major problems with Blogger!]

I’ve never seen a true blue rose – but I would like to:

One of the goals of rose hybridizers is to achieve a blue rose--a feat yet to be accomplished.  But if it ever happens, that would for sure represent the ‘super’ and ‘cali –beauty’ and the ‘fraglistic – delicate’ of our July challenge.  

This rose design was created by Anita Bradshaw and is from her Roses, Roses, Roses pattern collection.  I wanted to determine how she achieved such realism using only three shades of the same color. The concept is simple but the color and depth I was searching for in many of Ms. Bradshaw’s illustrations eluded my needle. However, a pattern for a 33” x 25” quilted wall hanging, similar to what you see, did suit my needs and was easily reduced to 11” x 14”.

One of the things I have always loved about our challenges is being able to explore different techniques and materials.  I had never made anything in silk.  This “blue rose” is in three shades of blue silk.  In doing this technique, the darkest value fabric is not cut.  The medium value fabric has holes cut in it to allow the darkest value to be seen (reverse applique).  The lightest value fabric is appliqued on top of the other two, the layers are fused and then finished with a tiny zig-zag stitch on the edges. 

And for some sparkle: After the silk design was finished, I added three values of blue seed beads each bead being sewn on individually, one at a time.

Next, from the book, “Beaded Bugs” by Nicola Tedman and Jean Power, I created the Eastern Blue Tailed Butterfly (Cupido comyntas) which decided his landing place is good camouflage.  The beading is done on fine wire and is made using the same beads added to the rose with the addition of white beads.

So you see, there are lots of ways to define - SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS!

Sara's Supercali... "Hello World"

I was first daunted by this theme. My brain conjured up images of umbrellas, Mary Poppins and for some reason Peter Max. I thought about how I would use the word and thought of moments or experiences which are so momentous, amazing and beyond description. That reminded me of the image I have of me looking at my first born, and she at me just moments after her birth.

Since that event was far in the past and my home is undergoing massive reorganization the first challenge was finding the photo and then getting it to digital form. Since I only have a sheet scanner available, I found my photo and took a picture of it with my phone and emailed it to myself. There I played with the color balance since the picture's age shows in its red tones.

My original plan was to thread paint the baby in the image but I decided I would never get it done so I traced the outlines. My husband refined my tracing and I copied it to a water soluble film stabilizer (I think I ended up using Superior Dissolve 4x). I made a quilt sandwich with the water soluble, pink fabric on top of butterflies on top of batting and backing (more butterflies). I used Mistyfuse to fuse the pink fabric to the background and bits and pieces of it to baste the quilt sandwich together. I used purple DMC cotton thread to stitch my outline and quilted around some of the butterflies. I chose to finish the edges of the pink fabric by couching fuzzy yarn over the edges using the purple cotton and a freemotion zig zag. I tied the yarn into bows at the corners. The quilt was trimmed to 11 1/2 by 14 1/2 and faced (the proportions don't look like that in my image here for some reason)

My choice of the butterflies is several fold. The soft colors all remind me of a sweet infant. My daughter went through a short stage of only liking purple and black so purple seemed appropriate. The butterflies remind me of hope and spring and sadly, they are ephemeral and we can only enjoy their beauty for a short period. My daughter's spiritual beauty will be with me and many she touched for the rest of our lives though hers was short. 

This moment of our first meeting was indeed a monumental beyond description  supercalifragilisticexpialidocious  moment.

Octobers Theme - Reflection

I picked the word REFLECTION for our October theme.  Hope you enjoy it.

Tricia

Tricia Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Quilt

I just love the Mary Poppins movie. I did find the theme difficult. The only image that kept coming back to me was when Mary Poppins opened her carpet bag. Mary removed so many amazing items that could not have possibly have fit into the carpet bag- the lamp and the house plant.  I decided to try and create the carpet bag with the lamp coming out.  It is one of my favorite scenes.  I purchased a doll house lamp.  I use fusible web, free motion stitching and a water color pencil to shade the table.  I was disappointed with Mary but with my house move I did not have time to work on her any more.

I also want to say I am part of an Artisan Show this weekend and probably wont get to look at all of your posts until monday.  Sorry about that.

Tricia

Dee's "Carried Away"

I love words – not only  for the meaning and use, but for texture,  syllables and tones. A word can set moods such as playful, morose, exciting, or  secretive and our challenge word, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (s32s), was a good example of that;  it is fun and frivolous, uncommon as far as use, but yet  known by all.  

To visually describe s32s,  I chose the parrot head umbrella that Mary Poppins used to transport herself.  I decided my umbrella would be a transport of a different sort - a boat floating in a pink ocean of pink flowers. “Carried Away” is the title of my piece.   I guess we are punning on this one as we drift away into fantasy.

  

The background is a hand-dyed cotton that was quilted in lines to create the ocean waves.  The fabric was too dark and the quilting did not show well, so I dry-brushed  two layers of light pink acrylic paint over the quilted background.  I drew the parrot umbrella and fused/stitched it on.  The paper flowers were purchased  and I reworked them by taking out the plastic centers and thinning out the petals. I stitched square beads and painted batting  into the centers to tone down the commercial look of the flowers.  The edging is something I call carnival prairie points because it looks like little flags hanging from the edges of  circus tents.  The edging is made from fused squares from the same hand-dyed fabric.