Shweshwe Postcards

As I've mentioned before, making Shweshwe landscapes and postcards is a passion.Making these postcards also seem to be working as a "warm up exercise" for more creative quilting. It's interesting. I happened upon this discovery this morning....

Anyway, without further ado, some photos of the latest postcards.....














I love making the postcards with the "yellow sun" in it....

I discovered I can draw

What an amazing discovery. I have spent my whole life believing that I can't draw a stick man properly. One of my challenges for this year was to gather the courage to take drawing lessons..... Well, after 2 lessons, I discovered that I can actually draw... The first lesson we drew apples and mushrooms. This week I took the following photo along......

The outline of the kitten is done - I am now shading her in. As soon as she is done, I'll post a photo of her.

Finished Trip Around the World

The latest Trip Around the World quilt is finally finished. This pattern must be one of my all time favorite patterns. It is simple but so effective. I also made a backing for the quilt out of left over fabrics from the top and cross hatched the whole quilt is variegated cotton - again, simple but effective.....

The first photo is of a close up of the cross hatching......

 

This is the backing - if you have followed my blog for a while you would have noticed that I cannot work in straight lines or blocks.....:LOL

This last photo of the top of the quilt. It looks much neater now that it finished off.....

Schools and Shweshwe pencil bags

The 2011 academic year is finally upon us.My daughter starts school tomorrow and my one son starts school on Wednesday. My other lad is being home schooled this year so he gets to stay at home for the year. I don't know whether he thinks home schooling is a blessing or a curse :LOL

Anyway.....back to matters at hand. I have been making pencil bags (why is it so difficult to sew a zipper into a pencil bag?) for the kids. It still amazes me that they would rather have goodies made by "MOM" rather than stuff purchased from the shop.

Dyed T-Shirts

Once a year my kids and I dye t-shirts for ourselves. It has become a family tradition. We normally use Sun Dye so have to wait for a bright sunny day but this time, we used the dye and Low Water Immersion dying technique I used to dye fabric I posted about in an earlier post.

We used purple and yellow dye to dye the first t-shirt and red/pink to dye the 2nd t-shirt. My son added black to his t-shirt but I still need to take photos of his t-shirt.

 

Conquering the Sketchbook

I am petrified of drawing or painting in any form...and have now decided to try and conquer this fear. Yesterday while waiting for my daughter to finish her cricket lesson (Yes, my daughter plays cricket.....), I took pencil crayons and tried a bit of scribbling....... My starting point was the colours of the fabric I have recently hand dyed - 3 primary colours - red, blue and yellow, and 3 secondary colours - purple, green and orange.

The first photo is a design of a quilt I want to make...simple but effective.

I love curved flowing lines - they remind me of my Burmese cat's whiskers......

Green Fabric and Words for 2011

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the Trip Round the World quilt I am doing as a raffle quilt...Well, it is still not finished. I was preparing to pin the 3 layers together so I can quilt it when I discovered that the backing fabric is too small. So....back to the shop we went and bought a wonderful green and yellow fabric. This photo below does not do justice to the fabric.......

The moral of this story is "Patience" and "Perseverance". It is very easy to get frustrated and impatient because things are not happening as fast as I'd like them to.

More fabric dyeing

Fabric dyeing is rapidly becoming a fascination of mine. Here are some photos of the results.

In this photo the fabric is waiting in front of the washing machine to be washed.

This is a photo of my second attempt - the colours are much better than the first attempt.

The next exercise I had to attempt was to dye pieces of fabric using 2 complementary colours ie Red and Green, Blue and Orange, and Yellow and Purple. I also learnt that the stronger the Soda Ash solution, the brighter the colours. These dyed fabrics are much brighter than the first 2 attempts at dyeing single colours.

This is a photo of the Red and Green fabric. I am battling to mix the dye to make a green other than olive green. It is getting a bit frustrating......

This purple and yellow fabric is quite bright - I wonder where I can use this fabric.....


This orange and blue fabric is also quite bright. You can see the neutral colours appearing where the 2 colours have mixed.

In this last photo I used up all the left over dye..... These fabrics are almost too pretty to use.

My kids and I also dyed some t-shirts. They are still being washed and photographed. My son David has helped a lot with the rinsing out and ironing of the fabric.