"Time" - Tempus fugit

When I learnt about the challenge theme "time", thoughts about how we all have a certain amount of time in our life, in our days. I found this beautiful fabric with the clocks on it - and I knew I wanted to use it. Next came the idea of certain incidents in our lifes - happy ones, not so happy ones. Big ones, smaller ones - and the clock fabric was cut, another fabric was inserted. Nice! Next thing that came to my mind was - a river. So I added some "river fabric" - Yes, I liked it! but still - it needed a bit more of that "time" - thing. How about an hourglass? - yes. But I wanted to give the impression of looking through glass ? - so let's use a very thin sheer fabric! for the sand, I used beads. Some of them are sewn onto the piece, but most of them are just "filled in", so they can move around. The edges were treated with my favourite method - zigzag with decorative yarns.

A detail shot - shows off the stamped letters "TEMPUS FUGIT"

Working on this challenge piece was exactly what I had hoped for ;-)) I had a lot of fun, I got a lot to think about, and I like the result. Besides that, I'm not absolutely happy with it. Maybe that's the reason why I already ordered another piece of the fabric with the clocks on it? I have a bigger version of it in mind ... And I can hardly wait to start with it! Now I'm off to look at the other challenge pieces ;-))

Time - Andromeda

I'm sorry to be a day late posting for the Reveal but time did get away from me a little with this challenge.  The main reason for this was my initial difficulty in settling on an interpretation and then my choice of hand stitching for the bulk of my project.  As it is I am cheating a little as I havn't actually finished the edge of my piece but I will get that done in the next day or three.

When I started to think about 'Time' my brainstorming produced a long list of possibilities.  The words of a Simon & Garfunkel song came to mind, 'Time, time, time  See what's become of me.......' and a hymn I think , ' Time like an ever rolling stream bears all our fears away.  They die, forgotten as a dream dies at the break of day'.

I thought of passing time, time past, holiday time, a stitch in time, old time, part time, daytime, night time, dreamtime, time travel, lost in time...... The list went on and on.  Then, on a visit to Greenwich Royal Observatory I was reminded that there are much larger measurements of time than seconds, minutes and hours.  I was particularly struck by an audio visual installation that stated that the light from the Andromeda Galaxy takes so much time to reach the Earth that's it's journey is measured in light years.  The view that we see of the Andromeda Galaxy is brought to us by light that left it approximately 2.6 million light years ago. 

So, with this thought in mind I chose to make my piece about the Andromeda Galaxy.

I have been wanting to explore the colour wash method of construction for sometime and so played with this a little by using a range of my hand dyed fabrics of various textures ( cottons, velvets, bamboo and something unidentifiable that had been tossed in the dye bath) together with a couple of commercial fabrics.  The piece was put together with curved piecing as a reference to the spiral nature of the galaxy but I think I could have been even more adventurous with the curvatures.  I layered the top onto polyester wadding and then hand stitched/quilted in a spiral from the centre outwards.  I felt the spiral stitching would reflect the spiral nature that I think is attached to time and I used hand stitching because it would take physical time to complete.

I used a Madeira Rayon for the quilting and then used a gorgeous metal thread from the Illuminations range at the Thread Studio to make reference to a beautiful infra-red image of the Galaxy that I found here.  Finally, I added some small beads to suggest some of the stars that contribute to the galaxy.

The finished size of Andromeda is just over A3 and I am thinking of facing it instead of binding it and will probably give it a curved edge rather than square.  As with the previous challenges I am left with pages of ideas to take forward from this theme and may develop it further for my Festival of Quilts entry, but maybe I won't use quite so much hand stitching!

Time Waits for No Man

My piece for this month's challenge is "Time Waits for No Man".


For the background fabric I had an image of a clock-tower from Graz, Austria. The piece was an experiment on transferring a photocopy using oil paints and gum arabic which I made about 3-4 years ago, and has been left bundled up in a scrap bin every since. It just shows that you should never throw away any samples or textile experiments, they'll come in handy some day!!

I then tried to find some clock or time-related fabric in my stash. Turned out that I nothing that I could use, so instead I gathered some watches from around the house (had to take some of people's wrists) and then just copied them onto fabric.

I didnt even scan the image into the computer - just copied it straight onto the fabric and paper. As another experiment, I didn't pretreat the fabric, just sellotaped a piece of white fabric onto the copy paper and sent it through the printer. I don't think the image would stand up to washing, but it worked fairly well for this purpose.

 I then bondawebbed this piece of fabric and cut out the watches. These were then appliqued to the quilt top and edge stitched in white thread, to further outline the watch shapes.

Alphabet stamps were then used to add the letter "time" all over the quilt top. The phrase "time waits for no man" was also stamped on to the piece.

After doing this, the piece was looking a bit bare and lacking something, so I decided some painted bondaweb was needed. The bondaweb was painted with acrylic paints using colours used in the quilt top e.g. brown, blue, red etc. 


Strips of the painted bondaweb were then added to the piece.

Pocket watch printed onto Extraorganza

I also collected some images of old pocket watches off the internet and printed them onto a sheet of "Extra-organza". I bought a pack of it at Festival of Quilts a few years ago and finally got around to using it!

The piece was then machine quilted using a variegated brown thread and two fabrics were used to make the binding.

Ticking Clock...

 My piece for this month's challenge is called 'Ticking Clock' and features a dandelion seed head.  As a child we used to 'tell the time' by blowing the seeds off the plant.  Depending on how many blows it took, that was the hour...only it was never correct!!

I used two weights of Lutradur, 8" x 11", one heavy (130) and one medium (70).

On the heavy one which would be underneath, I used a white Inktense block to cover the sheet in white, then when it was dry painted an iridescent sparkly paint over it.

On the medium sheet I used two or three different shades of green Inktense blocks and blended them.

With a fine pencil I drew the outline of the dandelion clock onto the green Lutradur and used a soldering iron to slash & burn on the design.

When laid on top of the heavy Lutradur the white showed through. 

I finished it by stitching the seeds using Madeira Rayon thread in bright white and embellishing the background with a Madeira metallic thread. 

This is the first time I've used Inktense blocks and found the colour amazing.  I don't have the facilities for dying here so this is the next best thing for me!

Architecture Challenge Piece

A week or two later than promised but its done. When the piece was printed I was amazed by how suitable this piece would be for last challenge, just cannot get the Burren images out of my head!

Ancient Arch

I love ancient ruins, the skill involved, dreaming of what the structures were like in their heyday, oh the romance of it all !
Played with images in photoshop for a few days, layering, cutting and stretching till I came up with image below which I printed onto A3 transfer paper which is about ten years old (one of the problems of hoarding), wasn't sure if it would work.

Next was what fabric should I use? While looking through my white collection I came across this :

Some textured cotton, so transferred image on it:

As the transfer paper was so old I wasn't sure what would happen, a few pieces lifted but was very happy with transfer as the texture of the fabric came through as a hoped:

Once the quilt sandwich was assembled using polyester wadding, I started machine quilting with some variegated thread and then bound the piece with black to finish.

Close up one

Close up 2