WIP Wednesday

is brought to you by the letters O-B-M-Q, T-A-S-T, C-Q-J-P and C&G, and the decade, 1970.

Steadily, my Orca Bay Mystery Quilt top is growing, at the rate of two rows a day... At this point, I've had to rotate it so I can still pin it up on my small (4' wide by 2' deep) design wall, so if you want to see what it really looks like, rotate it 90 degrees to the left!  ;-)

Take A Stitch Tuesday this week features one of my favourite stitches -- the blanket buttonhole stitch.  It's a great little stitch for embroidery and embellishment, as well as for applique with a 'country' feel to it.  I've made a start on my second Crazy Quilt Journal Project block (you may recall I've found myself doing one weekly to match the TAST challenge, despite the fact that the CQJP is a monthly affair), as you see here:

Isn't that a funky block?  The print is from one necktie; the solid orange-y bits are from the lining of another; and the gold is some dupioni silk I've had in my stash for a while.  Taken together, it reminds me of the kitchen floor in our first house, circa 1977...

Meanwhile,for the City & Guilds online class, I've been stamping around my work room.  You  might recall from this post that I've been working on designing a quilt block, and that, clearly, creating a skewed pattern from these shapes would be complex, requiring paper piecing or templates.

Before going down that road, we students were asked to think about creating patterned pieces using paint and stamps.  At the start of the program we were given a kit that included a piece of sticky-backed foam.  Now we had to dig out our foam pieces and create stamps with our chosen designs.  Mine is the skewed Windmill, and my stamps look like this.

First I did some samples on white paper and in my sketchbook.  This is a stamp using the 'positive' of the print:

This sample shows the 'negative':

Next, I did a sample or two on paint-washed paper.

From there, I moved to stamping with acrylic paint -- diluted slightly with textile medium, to make it easier to stitch -- on hand-dyed fabric:

 This one's a bit messy; the stamp bits didn't fill the block on which they were mounted, so some of that picked up paint from the brayer with which I was applying it...

This one is much neater because the stamp bits filled the block on which they were mounted.  Ah well, live and learn.

The next assignment will be to plan and execute the quilting, either by hand or by machine.  Stay tuned!