Whew! Finally a Deep Breath

Finally a break in the travel schedule, at least for me, but Kristin is at North Carolina Quilt Symposium.  If you are in the Fayetteville area this weekend, drop by and see her on the second floor of the Student Union.  She has a booth full of our yummy hand-dyed fibers, such as our texture packs.  For the next couple of weeks I'm going to blog about our new work that made it's debut at Spring Quilt Market in Portland, Oregon.  Hopefully this will show what you can do with our wonderful fibers.

 This is a close-up photo of our Briar Patch Texture Pack.  The colors and textures are enough to entice, but then what can you do with them.  The pack includes a piece of our hand-dyed burlap, a 3 piece cheesecloth gradation (1/2 yard each), 5 cocoons, 5 carrier rods and a variegated skein of Perle Cotton.

Every time I looked at this particular texture pack I saw flowers, so....flowers it is.  It was a simple decision  to work in a collage style, the finished piece could be framed or mounted on a quilted mat as seen in Intuitive Color & Design by Jean Wells.

Cutting off a piece of cheesecloth and playing with the loosely woven fibers just a bit, I could see the flowers taking shape. The small flowers are created by cutting off the top of a cocoon, incising it all the way around and voila they lie flat.  The flower receptacle on the light color flowers are created using a carrier rod.  Leaves were created using both cheesecloth and carrier rods.  Once all the parts were laid out it needed something, pinning it to the wall and stepping back for perspective it quickly became apparent it needed vertical lines. A few randomly cut pieces of our hand-dyed Kiwi Kona cotton provided the major lines,  embroidering provided others and the burlap that was unraveling were added for a more subtle effect. (When working with burlap I always stitch around the outer edge, but a few fibers always unravel.)  The cheesecloth flowers were hand stitched down using an embroidery back stitch in regular sewing thread.  By using a simple hand stitch you will not be distracted by the stitches, nor will you flatten the flower and loose the dimension. 

Hope we have inspired you to play with our wonderful hand-dyed fibers.  Come back again to see what else we have created.