Dupioni Squares

I finally finished this quilt in May after it languished in boxes, closets and suitcases literally for years.   So why did I mistreat this quilt for so long?

I discovered dupioni silk while preparing to make my wedding dress--I was learning all about different silks trying to decide which one would give me the look I wanted.  I went with the traditional satin for my dress, but fell absolutely in love with the texture, the shine, and the body of the dupioni. 

So one day over 10 years ago, my casual "window shopping" in a fabrics store turned into a rather pricy dupioni silk shopping spree.  I decided to make a quilt out of fabric squares--a simple pattern, but one that could take advantage of the fabric's distinct directional shine.   

Unlike silk satin, the dupioni silk is much more forgiving to work with--no need to worry about pin marks or chafing.  So the quilt came together very quickly.  Unfortunately, in my quest to make the quilt extra warm I doubled the batting.  As a result, the quilt turned out to be too thick for the sewing machine I was using then.  This blunder left me with only one way out--hand quilting, which requires significantly more patience than I will ever have.  And thus the quilt has been left virtually untouched for all these years. 

What saved this luscious quilt is my decision is to get a sewing machine for my mother.  While shopping for her, I could not resist replacing my from-craigslist never-quite-working-right machine with a new one.  My almost one-year-old Janome Magnolia 7318 deserves its own blog post.  All I will say here is that this workhorse was more than capable to easily sew through my quilt, allowing me to finally finish this project. 

Now the quilt spends its time in a place much more appropriate for it--my parents' living room couch.  

Butterflies!

Another week--another pattern.  This week's theme on Spoonflower was butterflies with a limited palette.  The following were the only colors allowed, though there was no requirement to use all of them.

As usual, I did not give myself enough time to play around, but here is my butterfly pattern.

Fireworks or Flowers in the Sky

Another pattern for Spoonflower

Musical Whales

Musical Whales is a new pattern I completed last night, just barely in time to submit it to the Black & White "fabric of the week" contest on Spoonflower.


Musical Whales Pattern

When the black & white theme was announced, I immediately thought of the piano keys.  How that evolved into whales, I know not. 

Musical Whales Pattern Detail

Let me know what you would like to see made out of this fabric.

Bird Frenzy - First Peek

I have been working on the birds on and off for a long time.  It is finally starting to converge, and I am so excited that I just cannot keep it to myself. 

Spring Is Almost Here

I first started sketching ducks and ducklings after watching an episode of BBC's Planet Earth depicting baby Mandarin ducks leaping out of their nest in the tree.  I am still working on the ducklings, but the duck led me to create this greeting card.

The bright colors will hopefully make you think of spring, even it is still snowing or sleating outside.

Designing Socks

I decided to participate in the sock design contest, held by Oregon based company, Sock It to Me. Below are the five designs I have submitted.

Here are a few variations that did not quite make the cut—the contest allowed 5 submissions per person.

The finalists are supposed to be announced on Monday on the Sock It to Me Facebook page!

A Little Late Night Screenprinting

Here is a preview of the little sea shell cards I have just screen printed.  More photos to come when my SLR is back from the shop. 

Winter Flowers and Owl Matryoshkas

In the last three years, I have been making greeting cards by hand. I had a great time learning how to make linocut prints and trying out screen printing. Yet the experience shows that the precious month between Thanksgiving and Christmas might not be the right time to try out any new techniques. Combining the usual holiday time crunch with my hopeless tendency to procrastinate results in lots of stress and less then perfect product.

This year I chose to curb my urge to do some screen printing. Instead I am digitizing my designs and printing them out on my inkjet. Delegating to the printer gave me a bit more time to bring my designs to completion sooner.  The current themes seem to include owls in the shape of matryoshkas (those nested Russian dolls), largely inspired by burrowing owls, and patterns--both are now available in my Etsy shop.  The plan is to work on nested owls next.

Reeds in the Back Bay Fens

The Back Bay Fens is a beautiful park, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead to be part of Boston’s Emerald Necklace park system. Olmstead turned saltwater marshes and swamp into a beautiful green park that surrounds meandering Muddy River.

In many areas of the park, the river banks are overgrown with reeds. While plans exist to remove these non-native, invasive phragmites next year, today they are still swinging high in the wind, providing refuge for a variety of birds, animals, and occasionally homeless people.

Green in spring and golden in the fall, they whisper gently in the wind and always shine brightly against the sky. I realize that they need to be removed, but still I find them majestic.

A few greeting cards with my attempts to capture the beauty of these tall grasses are now available in my Etsy store.

Fields

Every winter my husband and I visit Walla Walla--a small town in Eastern Washington, known for its sweet onions and more recently for its wineries. The town is surrounded by fields, everywhere as far as the eye can see. Mostly wheat fields.

Nick and I love to drive out into the fields. We get out of the car at the top of a hill, look around, breath in the icy fresh air. It is a bit idylic really.

I love the multitude of lines that transform the baren farm fields into patterns. I finally tried to capture those patterns. First my fields were snowy.

Then I went back to Walla Walla in July, and the fields were green with ripening wheat. Now my fields are green too.

The Towels Project

Silk screen printing cards was so entertaining that I decided to try silk screen printing towels. The idea was that printed flour sack towers might make good holiday gifts for the family. Printing trees on the towels went smoothly. I started with printing the design just twice, but quickly switched to printing it three times on each towel.

Printing the mushrooms turned out to be not so easy. I originally planned to print the entire trio of mushrooms on each towel, and spent a long time simplifying the design and carefully cutting out a stencil. But the stencil turned out to be a bit too big for my screen (I know, I am just brilliant), and it started falling apart right during the first test print.

At this point I almost gave up, but then decided to block off the two most problematic mushrooms, and continue with one promising one. In the end, I think the tree towels look better than the mushroom ones, but hey, I think mushrooms are a very appropriate print for a kitchen towel.

Frogs

While on vacation I spent a few hours sewing frogs. The Purl Bee pattern and instructions were very easy to follow. I embroidered the eyes instead of using beads, to prevent any babies swallowing any beads. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of filling the frogs with rice which rendered them unwashable. Not very smart on my part.

Hopefully, I can find a more versatile next time I make baby toys. If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Trees

I decided to explore silk screen printing. As a first attempt, I cut out a little tree design from regular paper, and taped the paper to the screen. Then I screen printed a few greeting cards.


Lessons learned:

• Regular printer paper is too thin--the paint started seeping through it very quickly. Next time I will use freezer paper instead.
• I really should have fixed the placement of the screen on the card (just a few pencil marks would have been enough) before I started printing. Centering the screen on paper was very difficult.

Patterns in Adobe Illustrator

After over a week of tinkering with shapes and rectangles, I have finally succeeded at creating a truely seamless pattern in Adobe Illustrator. (If you are wondering how the pattern in my previous post was created--by copy/pasting the shapes several times at regular distances.)

My pitfall was losing a few invisible rectangles. Let me explain. (If you are not an aspiring Adobe Illustrator amateurs like myself, the following details may not be particularly exciting.)

In order to define the bounding box for the repeating design, I had to create a rectangle that has no fill and border. Of course, you cannot see a borderless colorless rectangle unless you hover over its edge or select it. In the process of creating my pattern multiple times in the same document, I inadvertantly left a few of these rectangles behind. Since a design for a pattern can only have one bounding box, these multiple rectangles were no doubt confusing the tool. Last night as an act of desperation I started browsing through the layers in my pattern, and that is how I discovered that I had a few more invisible rectangles than I expected. Once I deleted all but one, my pattern generated correctly.

First Pattern Attempt--Sea Shells

Summer has been busy, and sadly I have hardly done any arts and crafts. But now I am trying to get back into the swing of things.

Since I LOVE looking at different patterns (e.g. fabrics, wallpaper, etc.), I decided to try and design one. I seem to be on an ocean/sea shell theme kick right now.

Mushrooms, Mushrooms, Mushrooms

Last week I spent time drawing a few mushrooms... Without any specific goals in mind...

City Skyline

I went running along Charles River yesterday, and the view of Boston from the Cambridge side of the river inspired me to paint.

Little Flower Cards

Last weekend I stumbled across some blank card stock still left over from our wedding stationery. Oh, the beautiful soft textured deckle-edged Fabriano paper--I just could not let it go to waste. So I printed the cards using a small linoblock I cut back in December. I decided that these single cards would make perfect Thank You notes for all the gifts I received during the holidays. Coming soon to my Etsh shop.

Hand Decorated Christmas Tree Ornaments

I lament the end of the holiday season. To help me (and you) transition into the regular work week, here are photos of some of the ornaments my super-talented cousin-in-law, Britney Drumheller, made for everyone in the family. Britney also designs clothing and jewelry.





Thanks, Britney!