Round Robin rows and portraits

Now I can share some recent projects.

This is a quilt made with Japanese fabrics for my sister in law in Guernsey who has been very unwell and currently having chemotherapy.  Actually it’s long overdue, her daughter has one and her dog!  Now should I make one for my brother?

The design is chain pieced and assembled without separating the chains but I can’t for the life of me remember how I did it.  It’s quilted on my domestic machine randomly with lots of practice for feathers and odd shapes.

My neice Rebecca holding it up.

detail of the quilting

I’m taking part in a round robin with my group in Wirksworth.  We each provided a bag of fabric and each month we swap bags and make a patchwork row with the fabric.  We’re not to share our work and about next July I’ll have my bag back with a completed top of about 10 rows.  What a great surprise it will be.  I include some Kaffe Fassett brights and black as a contrast.  The bags of fabric I’ve worked on so far have been very varied from chintzy flowers to farmyard fabric and batiks.  I’ll post pictures of them when we have the reveal in the summer.

A conversation with my online friends resulted in them wanting to do something similar from January.  We are making rows each month on a theme chosen by each person.  Mine is chickens and birds – that’s a surprise.  Some of the other themes are trees and leaves, sea sand and seaside.  etc.,

I received an amazing row for January all the way from Canada, the blocks are named after birds.  Some are called flying geese, birds in the air, birds of paradise and flock of birds.

This is the row I made for January  on the theme of trees and leaves that’s now in Illinois.

 I’ve another 2 rows ready to post to Texas.

I’ve also been working on a Lynette Anderson block of the month with TQS for the past year.  I’m a bit behind (3 months!).  Showing it will give me the incentive to get it finished. The original quilt is beautiful but I wanted to personalise it so the house and sheep have changed to chickens and a coop and most of the other applique has had a few changes. Just another couple of borders to go and then on with quilting and embellishing.

Here is the original

I’ve been itching to paint again so tried another quilt technique to transfer to watercolour.  This time portraits.  I did the same as I would do if I was making a fabric portrait.  With Paintshop Pro I changed it to greyscale and then posterised the picture, printed it out and traced features using a light box onto watercolour paper rather than fabric and painted as opposed to applique.  The posterised picture was used for reference for light and darker areas.  It worked pretty well although this is probably thought of as  cheating by watercolourists. I’d love to be able to draw properly.  Who’d have thought quilting skills transfer to other hobbies.

 

   

and this is a similar attempt to paint my grandson Thomas.

 

He’s growing quickly now but just as cuddly and cute, pictured with his other granny.

I’m sorry to say I lost my  6 year old little chicken Coot yesterday.  She’s been unable to walk for a month and needed lifting around and special care.  Despite the vets best effort with analgesics and antibiotics there was nothing that would improve her quality of life or return function so we took the hard decision to say goodbye.  We had a lot of good times with her and she had a happy life in my garden.

Thank you for reading