This is what I was doing this Sunday, when I wasn’t bullying Sqeze into taking the photos for my last post. It is for the final activity in Module 1 of my C&G course. I was to do a piece of free appliqué based on a portion of or the whole painting of the pumpkin. Well I decided to base mine on just a part of the painting:

This section still contains all the colours from the painting, but I liked the proportion of the different colours one to another in it. Seeing it without the white background also affects how you perceive it. It became obvious that it didn’t need a pale background.

Here is the finished appliqué. The strips are just fixed with Bondaweb at the moment.

The finished size at the moment is 45 x 33 cm. The strips are about 1cm wide, some a little narrower and some almost twice as wide. The background fabric is a piece from one of my dyeing classes at QU. It’s amazing how at some point in time you find a use for all the fabric you dye, even the pieces which were a “failure” at the time (not that I considered this piece a failure). The strips are all commercial prints and batiks. They almost all came from my box of scraps. It was pleasing to be able to use them too. A reward for becoming a hoarder!

I decided to keep the 2 areas of colour separated because the inside and the outside of the pumpkin are such different colour schemes. The shape is roughly the shape of the pumpkin too. I didn’t set out to make an abstract pumpkin but looking at the painting the ideas just came. Then I pulled out my box of scraps and started choosing the fabrics. It just went on from there. I chose to cut strips because the skin of the pumpkin is striped green and pale yellow. I also remembered seeing a matchstick quilt by Melody Johnson at the Quilt Expo in Lyon in 2006. Not that my strips are matchstick sized, but I think it influenced me to leave the gaps between the strips, which had the advantage that you can still see the background fabric which I like and didn’t want to cover up completely.

In the next module we will be continuing to work on it. So I am curious to see what we do next. It was an interesting series of exercises to see how you can go from a pumpkin to a painting to a colour scheme and end up with an appliqué design. I’ve read about the idea in some of my books on quilt design but hadn’t put it into practise myself. So again I’ve learnt that you have to actually do things and not just read about them to get the maximum benefit.

I’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front. Last weekend I exhausted myself with a marathon dyeing session. The reason for the dyeing was two activities for my C&G course. I had to dye a 6 section colour wheel. You were allowed to skip the activity if you had taken Level 2, where there must be a similar exercise or they encouraged those who had dyed one before to try a 12 section colour wheel. Well I’ve not done Level 2, but I have dyed a colour wheel before, so I thought it had better be a 12 section wheel. (I was going add a link here to a previous post but the first colour wheel seems to be pre-blog.) It was also a 12 section one, but it wasn’t anything to write home about. The oranges all looked the same, as did the purples. At the time I had only just started dyeing and didn’t have all the supplies/suppliers sussed. This time I have more experience and have worked out the best supplies. It turned out much better. Nice to be able to see that I have made progress.

Lying on each piece of fabric is a skein of crochet cotton that I dyed in with the fabric. I was quite sceptical as to whether it would work as it was obviously bleached as well as mercerised and “gasiert” (whatever that means - I’ve been unable to find out despite google). I washed it first in synthrapol. Whether that was necessary or not I don’t know, but the results were way beyond my expectations.

I also had to dye a larger piece of fabric using a pair of complementary colours in the dye bath. This was a repeat of an activity done previously with watercolour paints, to see that mixing complementary colours gave browns or greys. Well my watercolour attempts were pretty unsuccessful. The paints didn’t want to mix much at all. I was quite surprised as my niece had told me she didn’t get on with painting in watercolours, because everything ended up muddy. Well not for me - even when it was supposed too. My dyeing turned out much better. I tried two combinations - yellow/purple and red/green. The results of the yellow/purple were particularly pleasing.

For those who are interested, I was using Jacquard dyes: Fire Engine Red, Medium Blue and Lemon Yellow. The fabric was the cheapo 100% cotton from IKEA. It is not particularly a fine weave but it is perfectly ok for the stuff I’m doing and it’s an unbeatable price of 2€ a meter and 150cm wide.