Judy's Paint the canvas

Painted canvas
I kept seeing paint dripping down a canvas so that’s what I made. The yellow and green fabrics are some that I hand dyed with my friend, Ellis Bennett. We did it in her garage in JULY in TEXAS. That tells you how much we wanted to dye fabric! Nobody would do that if they didn’t have a passion for quilting and creating.

The orange, blue, and purple are Cherrywood fabrics. They hand dye their own fabrics and are the ones who have a challenge every year. Last year was the Bob Ross challenge and this year is Diana.

The other part I couldn’t get out of my mind was the paintbrush. I wanted to be able to paint with it. All of these fabrics were in my stash and it was fun to rediscover them and make a paintbrush from them. I just cut out a section that looked like paintbrush hairs from McKenna Ryan’s line called “At Home In The Woods”. I had a little piece of gray that looked like metal and then the handle is a piece that I purchased from the Waco quilt guild president when she moved to Arizona back in 1995.

The paint was cut from a fun fabric called “Effervescence” designed by Amelia Caruso for Robert Kaufman. Sometimes it is so hard to use a fabric because you want to save it for just the right project. I’ve decided that now is the right time. This week I have cut into it 2 times and I still have some to use on other projects. I sewed squares of the right colors together and fused Bosal knit interfacing on the back to prevent it from fraying too much and to give it body so that it would paint nicely.

I sewed a vinyl sleeve to hold the paintbrush and paint. Enjoy.

Sara's Rock Quilt

Peter is my rock

I enjoyed this theme because there were so many places to develop it. I remembered that my husband said his name, Peter, as derived from greek, means rock. Peter has been my rock as he has supported me through my most nightmarish experiences. My quilt was produced using thread sketching on some fabric that I had dyed yellow many years ago. I chose yellow since it is one of Peter's favorite colors. This is a very abstracted sketch.

Thread sketch of my rock, Peter

I used this picture which was converted from color to black and white.  

Quilt was based on this image

I actually did the thread sketching twice. The first was done using a tracing on some very old Sulky Solvy stabilizer. I pulled off all the stabilizer I could and then I stuck the piece into cold water. I really liked the thread work on this but unfortunately the ink that I used to trace the image (a Faber-Castell pen that was supposed to be permanent) stained the fabric. I may try to salvage this piece later using dyes (Peter wants me to try tea dying). I tried again by tracing the image onto tracing paper and stitching through the tracing paper with 1 line of stitching. I then removed the tracing paper and went back over the image with more thread. In both cases I used brown rayon thread with a thin polyester bobbin thread. I stitched through a quilt sandwich. I finished the completed piece by quilting with yellow rayon thread on my domestic machine.

Initial thread sketch with staining

Judy's Quilting Doodle

Since doodling is what I have been doing with quilting, I had to make a quilt that showed some of my favorites. I incorporated the zippers to add interest. One of them opens to reveal the piecing inside. The white stitching is from the bolt of fabric where they pieced it together at the manufacturers which I thought was fun to add to the mix. 

This is the piecing inside the zipper.