Latest Work and Mark-making Experiments in Batik

My latest batch of Prayer Flag Brooches are finished and listed in my Folksy and Etsy Shops.

These ones have a light and fragile look with shades of cream, beige and old gold, lace and buttons.

My next project is going to be a tall thin textile wall hanging based on the path at Samye Ling Buddhist Centre.

The path really caught my eye on a visit there, with its recycled paving slabs of different sizes, and occasional bricks or yellow stripes. I took the photographs below and made a couple of drawings to simplify it into a wall hanging.

My plan is that many of the steps on the wall hanging will be an art or craft that I have tried over the years as my own 'Path to Enlightenment' of learning about art.

I have tried to make some of my own fabrics with painted dyes, or batik technique and dye.

Painted dye on cotton fabric

Batik with painted dye on cotton

I added these two patterns to my libraries of patterns on Society6 and Redbubble. They look pretty good on the rugs, mugs, bags etc!

I'm on my third 'step', so a long way to go on this project!

Work in Progress: 'Growing' Rag Rug

I have just started working on a new rag rug wall hanging, called 'Growing'. This one is based on drawings of Tansy plants from our garden, which I have turned into an almost abstract pattern. Below is an acrylic painting (now sold) that I painted on the same subject:-

The rag rug is made from strips of recycled t-shirts, hand hooked through a backing fabric.

The design is drawn onto the backing fabric with a black Sharpie pen. The t-shirt strips are cut with dressmaking scissors, and the ends are snipped to height with the napping scissors. (This pair were a birthday present from my husband from Ernest Wright & Son Ltd. They are very sharp and a pleasure to use.) The background will be a mixture of mid to dark blue and black, and the flower heads will be pale to bright yellow to yellowish green.

Work in Progress: Stripy Scrap Quilt

I started on this lap quilt a few months back, and had to stop for a while to complete a couple of commissions, but I have finally finished piecing the top.

This is how it started out: a pile of little scraps, including fabrics dating back to the 1970s (summer dresses, shirts, off cuts from other projects etc):-

These were sorted into dark, medium and pale tones, then cut into strips, pieced into squares of about 5 3/4". Then trimmed to 5 1/2" squares. Because of the scraps I was working with, there was just about every colour and tone possible, so I tried to make each square work with the contrasts and colours within itself.

Here is a collage of some of the squares I came up with (randomly arranged).

When I had 144 squares, I started to work out a pattern with the random blocks. I decided to go for bands of colour in the columns, going from light to dark in the rows.

Here is the finished top, being basted to the wadding and backing (with help from Brock!):-

Just the quilting and binding to do!

Work In Progress: Stripy Scrap Quilt

After looking at my collection of small fabric scraps left over from other projects, I decided to make a quilt using as many of them as I could.

Scraps sorted into piles of dark, medium and light tones.

The 'rules' were that they would all be made into stripes and sewn into squares 5 1/2 inches across (to give a 5" finished square). The width of the strip depends on the size of the scrap, with some pieces being joined to form larger pieces. Stripes vary between 3/4 inch and 2 inches in width before being sewn together. I tried to make a variety of light and dark combinations so that I have something to play with when I join them into a quilt. Each square has a coherent colour combination within itself, but some of the resulting squares clash pleasingly with others. I haven't decided yet whether to make one large quilt or a number of smaller ones. I will wait until I have a large enough number of finished squares to arrange into a pattern.

Photo collage of some of the 5 1/2" squares