Quilt Show Weekend

I'm enjoying my new retirement status.  I thought I would have accomplished more in this last week, but so it goes. I've been  trying to find a home for all my stuff I brought home from my classroom. Over 30 years it added up.  Deciding what to keep, why I should keep it and then where to keep it is time consuming, but also a nice trip down memory lane. I came across old figure drawings done in college, weaving charts, calligraphy pieces, etc.

This last weekend was our local guild's big quilt show. I worked in admissions on Saturday morning and it seemed to me we had more visitors than ever, which is great. I had three quilts in the show. Below are pictures of two of them.  I wish the lighting in the building were better so the embroidery would show up, but what can you do. Others I spoke with had the same complaint as well.

Above is "A Little Birdie Told Me"

This is a closeup of of "Majestic Magenta Mountains."

Sun Printing on Paper and Fabric

I made it!! I'm retired!! Whoo Hoo!!  To celebrate it I did some sun printing on paper and fabric yesterday afternoon. As with many things, I approached it very intuitively.  I gathered together some 'masks', flat objects to place on the wet paint, which end up showing up lighter as the paint is pulled from underneath those areas to the exposed areas.

The first three photos show fabric and paper which has been been dampened, then painted with diluted Setacolor transparent paints. Next flat masks were placed on top and then the whole piece put outside to dry in the 105 degree temperature we had yesterday.  Had a lot of fun doing these and need to explore further. And I'll have time to do that now!

Notice dead grass below papers.

Crumbled up linen tablecloth above and below after it dried.

You get two fabrics for the price of one with sun painting because the back side

 is a lighter version of the front.

This and the one below are printed on paper.

Quilting New Quilt

Didn't have time to post last week.  Been very busy working to get everything done at school and trying to hang in there for the last nine and a half days of teaching. Sooooo looking forward to retirement.  I did find a little time to do some quilting, by machine and hand on my latest quilt, the one for  our Cutting Edge Fiber Group to be displayed at the next PIQF in October.

I machine quilted the dark channels with lots of circles.

In other areas, I'm doing hand embroidery. And in yet other areas, I may do nothing. It's an art quilt. It won't be washed and doesn't need it. I know the trend is to machine quilt the heck out of quilts with row after row of stitching, but I kind of like that the fabric puckers a bit, like fabric, which it is.  At our last Cutting Edge meeting we had an interesting discussion about how much quilting is needed on an 'Art Quilt'.