Today I pasted together the pieces of the line drawing to make one image and then made the traced copy using vellum. I then tried unsuccessfully to transfer the markings to the muslin. I only had yellow dressmakers carbon paper and that really wasn’t good enough. I can just about see half of the markings but the dotted lines didn’t show up at all. I shall have to get a darker colour carbon paper tomorrow and have another go. We used to have some typing carbon paper but I haven’t seen it for years. It may even never had made it to this house. I’m not sure the typewriter did

Here are a couple of photos of my wasted effort:

I wasn’t feeling up to doing much more than I’ve shown so far on my fabric portrait, as I had a cold over the weekend. I did have the energy to make mock ups of my ideas for making connections. This was another activity in the C&G course. It wasn’t that easy to come up with new ideas. Most of the ways of making connections with fabric are well known - zips, buttons, lacings, hooks and eyes, velcro etc.

These were my ideas:

This morning I went over to the fabric shop in Bad Camberg where my quilting and patchwork got started for the second time a few years ago now. I needed to stock up on fabric to use in my portrait. I have some at home of course, including some that I dyed myself in Marjie’s Quilter’s Palette class at QU, but I didn’t think I had a wide enough selection.

The shop has moved across the square in Bad Camberg since I was last there. It’s still in an old timbered buidling, but is bigger with room for more fabrics. It was good to see Margareta again and have a bit of a gossip. She had a class going on so we didn’t hold her up too much.

Here’s my booty:

I also bought some pelmet vilene ready for making my container for the C&Gs course. I’m a bit distracted on that front right now. Might do some work for it tomorrow perhaps.

I’ve enrolled in a course at Quilt University on fabric portraits. It’s given by Marilyn Belford, who has made many award-winning fabric portraits. I’m going to make a fabric portrait of my Dad from this photo. To make a pattern for the quilt, I need to take a photograph of the subject and posterize it. After that, I have to trace round some of the contours to mark out the pieces I am going to patch.

Posterizing the picture was straight forward. I used The Gimp, which I downloaded from Wilber loves Apple and installed without problems under Leopard (OS X 10.5.5).

I had expected that I would be able to use The Gimp to draw my lines too, and indeed it does draw lines very well. Unfortunately, being a pixel editor, it doesn’t allow you to change the format of the line after it has been drawn - I wanted to change the color and make some lines dotted. So I had to do some research on the internet to find an easy-to-use vector graphic editor to allow me to manipulate lines after I’d drawn them.

What I found was Inkscape, which - like The Gimp - is open source and free of charge. Inkscape is a darned sight easier to learn to use than The Gimp, which is powerful and correspondingly complicated to use! You can import a JPG posterised photograph and trace the lines over the photo. The best is to create a separate layer for the lines, then you can blend out the photo when you’ve finished and add a layer with a plain white background. I found quite a bit of information on the web, but the two documents I referred to most are:

Tavmjong Bah’s Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing Program

Deviant Art’s Quick Guide to Inkscape.

Here’s a not very good image of my line drawing produced in Inkscape.

I have been playing around with ideas for my container. It will be my first assessment piece for the C&Gs course. I’m not going to say too much about it now. It’s still very much on the drawing board and anyway I don’t want to give the game away Here are some photos of the first experiments.

I wanted to share this image that Marie my tutor sent me today of some more manipulation of my churn dash quilt block. I really like what she has done and her use of the turquoise as a contrast colour.

Here’s what she said:
“Looking at your tiled version made me think of something which I took the liberty of creating in PSP, what do you think, extending the experiment in tonal value to a complementary for some of the squares?”

I think it’s great so here it is for you all the look at too.

I made this block last night between chatting to my sister on the phone and via Skype. (What a neat service that is.) It was really not much of a challenge. I should have made the half square triangle squares slightly larger and then trimmed them down as I learnt in Myrna’s class but I didn’t and regretted it after the event.

Anyway it turned out fine. I decided to go for a monochromatic colour scheme but there maybe should be a little more of a value change between the 2 darker colours:

I also played around a bit in Photoshop to see what more than one block would look like together.

Well the next little project is completed. Either I’m getting settled into the routine of this course now or the exercises are getting easier, but I seem to be zipping through Module 5. This activity involved making templates, which wasn’t too arduous

and then sewing the block. You could choose to sew either by hand or by machine, but at some point in the course you must have done both. Since this was a fairly small piece I chose to hand piece it. I made it while watching the box last night.

The seams were pressed again using the skills I learnt from Myrna. I am glad I took her pressing classes.

I do hope this is the last exercise based on this block. It really doesn’t appeal to me at all. Somehow the proportions of the points seem all wrong to me.

The next exercise was to make our own pattern for foundation piecing based on an architectural theme. I spent a long time choosing an image. It is actually not that easy to find one that can be easily interpreted as foundation piecing. The first problem was with curved lines - tricky to do as foundation piecing - and I had lots of interesting images with curved lines. The next problem was one of complexity. I had an interesting photo of a wall but found it almost impossible to divide the shapes up in some kind of order that could be pieced. The wall had fancy brickwork and open holes in it and none of my lines made for easy piecing. I finally settled on a door. It’s from a photo of a museum in Salamanca that I took mainly for the interesting facade painting.

Having made the first little house and seeing for myself that the end is result is a mirror image, I realised that I had the diagonal lines in my pattern going the wrong way. Luckily I had only drawn it in pencil at that point so I was able to correct the mistake.

I divided the plan into two halves that I made as two foundation pieced blocks and then sewed together after trimming down to a 1/4 inch seam. The outer two pieces on the top and bottom were done the same way. I trimmed the block and strip pieced the final two pieces.

The little “squares” in the centre of the square panels are attached afterwards. I made the foundation with triangles. I had some fabric with a printed diamond design that I decided to use instead of squares, as they are almost square. I thought they added a bit of visual interest too. They are attached with “Wonder under” as they are cut on the cross grain and shouldn’t fray. If I was feeling really keen I could use invisible thread to secure them, but I’m not For me they are good enough.

Made a little house using foundation piecing. I’ve made one small quilt in the past using the foundation piecing method. It was a kit that I bought from a quilt shop. It was about the second or third quilt I ever made. The kit supplied a paper foundation and I found it a real pain getting all the paper off the back of the quilt when it was finished. I lost interest very quickly in the method.

It has turned up as a technique now in the C&G course. The notes suggested using Stitch and Tear as the foundation. The haberdashers in Frankfurt sold it, so I bought some in the week after work and gave it a whirl yesterday on the little house block. It is a vast improvement over paper. Not only is it easier to remove, but it isn’t a major disaster if little bits get left behind as it’s like interfacing.

Here’s the little house. The pattern is printed in the corner of an A4 sheet of paper and I made a one to one sized block, so you can see it’s quite small.

And here’s just the house. I decided to piece the chimney instead of appliquéing it and then realised you had to be pretty accurate with the placement if you didn’t want a drunken chimney! Solved that problem by tracing the sewing line onto the piece to be attached and lining it up with the line on the foundation.

The little house reminds me of a great game I had as a kid. It was called “Build or Bust”. It consisted of various wooden blocks and a pack of cards on which were printed pictures of the blocks. Each player had to build a series of house that grew in size. The first to build the biggest one won. Each player collected building pieces by turning over a card and collecting the piece shown on it. When you had all pieces for a house you shouted build and started building while the others continued to turn over cards and collect pieces. Some of the cards had a bust picture on them - a picture of a falling down house. If this card was turned over while you were building you had to go back to the smaller sized house and return all your extra pieces to the pile. This little pieced house would have been a middle sized house in terms of building complexity in the game. I wonder if the game is still produced now? It certainly provided hours of fun in my childhood.