My challenge piece/Art Quilts

Yesterday I stopped by a local quilt shop, Pine Country Quilts, to visit with the owner Shelly, meet her adorable baby boy, and talk about Landscape/Art quilting. I have been longing to learn some of the techniques used in these formats, especially since I started blog-surfing the Surface Design blogs awhile back. Shelly is going to try to put together a machine quilting class for December, and I'm really excited about it. I left her shop and stopped at the library where I picked up 3 books pertaining to Art quilts, Landscape quilts and quilting techniques. I have them for 3 weeks to pore over, experiment with, and learn from.

One thing I discovered today: my Pfaff 1210, which I got in May of 1980, has feeders that can be lowered, and a darning foot. Hard to believe I never knew about that all these years! So I can at least start playing with the freeform machine quilting technique. Meanwhile, I have done a little more to my challenge piece, although I'm slowly running out of ideas of what to do next... guess they will come to me! Here's the latest:

Progress report

My challenge piece is starting to take shape... I added some discharge 'sprongs' to the background last night to tie it to the main piece. I have no idea where this is going, but I am beginning to see a 'sea pear', a fictitious relative of the sea cucumber, emerging... aha! A new species!

Uncharted territory

At our playdate last weekend, Melly, our facilitator/teacher/inspirer, gave us a challenge: Cut into at least 2 of the fabrics we have created using Surface Design/complex cloth techniques; create a piece approximately 12" x 12". So today, I began my project, not knowing what the end result would be. I had one LWI-dyed piece from the playdate that I sprayed bleach over using sequins as a resist, and dishwasher gel to stamp some of the surface. It came out rather interesting, so I decided to use it as my main theme. I have cut out several shapes and pinned them over another LWI piece I dyed at the same time I dyed the cut piece. Here is what I have so far:



I cut away 2 of the stamped areas and pinned elsewhere on the main piece, then slashed some of the remaining fabric to create the 'rays'. Now it's time to let my imagination have a go at what I should do next.... more to come!