“Celebration” – Fiber Funsters Group Reveal 2

“Opening” by Christina Fairley Erickson

A small favor to ask… I’ve entered my quilt “Opening” in a online gallery of challenge quilts which viewers can vote on their 4 favorites.  Please check it out and vote for your favorites!  http://quiltinggallery.com/2013/01/18/vote-challenge-quilts/

Last Wednesday, I showed the quilts that our small art quilt had made for our first challenge around the word “Opening.”  Today, I have the next set, which were made with the prompt “Celebrate.”  Due to the holidays, not everyone had either finished a piece, but we have quite a bit of diversity in what we do have!

The first piece, made by Sally, is entitled “Celebrate! Belize Anniversary.”  Sally and her husband went to Belize for their 40th anniversary and really enjoyed the snorkeling.  Sally had recently taken Lola Jenkins‘ Thread Art Class through Craftsy, and used her know knowledge to make the incredible picture in this quilt. She layered the color using Crayon d’Arche Swiss water soluble pastels and encapsulated it with Textile medium.  The beads hanging on the left include gifts of a dried seahorse which Sally had received from her family and a mini plane and passport.

“Celebrate! Belize Anniversary” by Sally Simmons
“Celebrate!” by Marylee Drake

 Marylee and I were on the same wavelength, inspired by the incredible fireworks show at the Space Needle for New Years Eve.  See my post “Fireworks Freemotion Quilting Design” for a great photo from that show.  Marylee’s piece is hand-stitched and beaded for the fireworks.  Her balloons are double layers or organza–she didn’t quilt them down, so they are puffy, semi-transparent and add a great texture.  She had a fantastic tip for getting lettering on a quilt- print out the word(s) you want in the font and size you want from your computer.  Then put that paper on the right side of your quilt and stitch over it.  Tear away the paper (you might want to use paper-piecing paper which runs through your printer).  Then you can either add additional stitching or paint in the lettering, as Marylee did here using Lumiere fabric paints.  Marylee still has some work to complete, including possibly adding in a small Space Needle to finish the piece off.

I used my hand-dyed and painted fabrics to make an abstract piece that reminded me of New Years.  I quilted the piece with the fireworks design I created, then quilted over the right-side fireworks with silver thread, to echo the silver in the painted section in the center.  I also added a decorative machine stitch in the center portion and some fuzzy, metallic yarns.

“Fireworks” by Christina Fairley Erickson
Caroline has lived a fascinating life with lots of travel to remote places and living abroad while in the Peace Corp.  When she lived in Africa, it would be completely dry for 6 months.  When the rain finally came, it was something worth celebrating!  Children would go out and dance naked in the rain, mothers would hold their squealing little babies out from under the eaves in the downpour, everyone would sing and be joyous.
“The Rain He Done Come” by Carolyn Hitter

You might also be interested in:

Fireworks FreeMotion 
Quilting Design		 “Opening” 
The Fiber Funsters 
Group Reveal 1		 The Fiber Funster’s 
10 x 16 Group Challenge

Fantastic Blogs to Check Out:
For great ideas on how to freemotion quilt your projects, go to the Freemotion Quilting Project.  Leah Day’s tutorials are fantastic!

Get inspired with different quilter’s completions at Confessions of a Fabric Addict!

Nina Marie Sayre’s great art quilting blog shares a great way to transfer a drawing onto fabric for redwork or other stitching

See some great projects and quilts recently finished on Richard and Tanya Quilts

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“Opening” – The Fiber Funsters Group’s Reveal 1

The Fiber Funsters, my small art quilt group, met this morning at my home for our monthly meeting. Our group decided last summer to start doing a challenge piece based on a particular word every-other month. Our first word was “Opening” and we shared these pieces with each other in November.     Today I was able to photograph most of our pieces to share here!  
“Convento Santa Catalina” by Carolyn
Hitter

The first piece to the left, “Convento Santa Catalina” was made from a photograph that Carolyn took at a convent in Arcquipa, Peru.  Carolyn’s technique includes the use of tulle to create the shading and shadows.  She built up separate parts of the landscape and then put the different elements together, doing a majority of the stitchwork before backing the piece and keeping the quilting minimal.

Opening by Rebecca Simmons

Next, Rebecca also chose an opening flower (as did I.)  Rebecca made her piece using Tsukineko inks, basically painting both the flower and background.  She uses heavy stitch to accent the petals edges and veins.  The center of her flower has Angelina fiber and beading.

“Opening” by Debbie Hiatt

Debbie’s piece is abstract, using up “leftovers” – scraps of silks most of us would love to have!  She highlights the “opening” in her piece with hand embroidery stitches, while the curved machine quilting echos the shape of the opening.

“Australia Rock” by Sally Simmons

“Australia Rock” in Narooma, Australia has a natural opening that Sally remembers vividly from her trip there. She used one of her photos to complete this piece, adding shading with tulle and very realistic looking greenery with threadwork.

Charo Lopez’s “Open to Love”

What would this theme be without a piece that really opens?  Charo’s heart stays closed with a bit of velcro, but you can also open it to see what is inside… the great loves of her life, her pets.  She says that Devon, the black cat, is her only pet at this point, but the others are waiting for her in heaven.  Charo used a template of hearts with glitter, paint, and rhinestones at different places over the piece, as well as lots of buttons (surrounding the main red heart both outside and inside, giving a real depth to the piece, and little heart buttons interspersed on the front.)  She printed photos on fabric of two of her animal loves, as well as having different charms to represent some of her pets.

“Open to Love” by Charo Lopez with heart opened
Close up of the inside of Charo’s heart

Marylee designed this cute piece with “openings”.  The little round balls seem to be rolling down the planks and through the openings like a pinball or pachinko machine, only to end up being gobbled up by a “Pack-man” shaped object.  Guess this dates me that I know pinball, pachinko and packman, huh?

“Opening” by Christina Fairley Erickson

I’ve shown the piece I made called “Opening” previously on this blog.  It is all machine embroidered.

While some of our newest pieces are still works in progress, I’ll share them soon!

Thanks for all the inspirational projects at Seven-Alive! and Sincerely, Paula.

You might also be interested in:

The Fiber Funster’s 
10 x 16 Group Challenge		 Designing for a Theme Designing for a Theme 
– Innovation Part 1
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Week 2 of the 5 x 7 Artist Challenge

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This week I’ve completed this windmill design for the 5 x 7 Challenge. As I mentioned previously, I haven’t done a lot of paper-piecing before, but it seemed like the perfect technique for the background color splashes which I wanted.

Week 2 completed piece for the 5 x 7 Challenge
Designed and made by Christina Fairley Erickson
Original hand-drawn design
Back side

I ended up change quite a few things from my original hand-drawn design. First, I had small triangles around the center circle of the windmill, which I decided would simply be too small to be done effectively for the size of the finished piece. As I was going through my fabrics for the yellow color section, I found one with the circular motif which I decided would work well as the center, and chose to hand-appliqué it on. The other major change is that I didn’t add any struts to the windmill blades. I was going to machine appliqué some red fabric, but it looked too heavy. I then thought I’d machine quilt lines in, but once I finished quilting the colored background areas, the result was that the “windmill blades” and center stand or puff out since they haven’t been stitched. I like the look this way and think the result of stitching in strut lines may ruin this effect.  The other obvious change is that I decided to change the placement of the colors.

Sample/tester I made of Leah Day’s freemotion
quilting design “Sharp Angled Maze“

I tested out a freemotion quilting design which I thought would work well for my background colors which I found from Leah Day’s Freemotion Quilting Project which she calls “Sharp Angled Maze.”  Overall, I think the design worked well within my piece.  The one problem that you can catch glimpses of is that with using a different color of thread on the back side of the piece, you can occasionally see bits of the bobbin thread on the front.  In the practice piece, you can see this in the lower half (particularly lower right), but I was able to adjust my machine tension to get rid of the problem.  I’m not sure whether it was the additional thicknesses of the seam allowances, but even with my top tension adjusted all the way down as far as it goes, I still had a little bit of bobbin thread showing.  If I were doing this for a large piece for competition, I’d probably work with it more.  Perhaps a smaller needle size?  Different thread?  Tighten the bobbin tension?

The other criticism I would have of this piece is that when you are further away from it, the blue and purple sections are a bit too close in value to the black/red/orange/yellow windmill blades.  If I were to do it on a larger scale, I would want to add more light values into those sections.

I welcome your comments and critiques on my pieces!

Thanks to other participants this week in our challenge!  Here are what others are working on:

“Wet” –  Hand-painted, thread-sketched and discharged
with bleach pen by Carol

Carol “LandscapeLady” has created this wonderful piece entitled “Wet”.
Check out her blog to see her photos of working on this piece throughout the process from photo to completed 5 x 7 art piece.

I really love the movement in the piece… you can feel, as well as see, the drops of water being joyfully shaken off this dog!

“Indonesian Dancer” – Work in Progress by Lise

Lise has this work in progress called “Indonesian Dancer.”  She is planning to add more to it, so we’ll look forward to seeing more- next week?   The repetition in this piece: wavy lines, musical notes, headdress elements, and sets of eyes all building the theme.  The wavy lines and lines surrounding the face particularly add to the primitive, ethnic feeling.  I can’t wait to see it finished!

Other blogs to check out:
Work in Progress Wednesdays at Freshly Pieced – delightful modern quilts

Wow Us Wednesdays at Savvy Southern Style… there are some really amazing projects here!

A Lovely Year of Finishes from Sew Bittersweet Designs has a great monthly goal-setting and project-finishing challenge

You might also be interested in:

Week 1 of the 5 x 7 
Artist Challenge		 Getting Started May be 
the Hardest Part		 52 Week 5 x 7 Challenge 
to Readers

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Fireworks FreeMotion Quilting Design

My “Celebrate” piece (unfinished)

I’m working to finish up my “Celebrate” 10 x 16 Challenge quilt for my small Art Quilt group, the Fiber Funsters.  I struggled with this theme for some reason… with the holidays, it seemed like it would be a no-brainer.  But I finally decided to play with some of my hand-dyed and painted fabrics I had made and came up with an abstract design that I’m satisfied with.  Maybe not thrilled, but satisfied.

The feeling that I got from the fabrics in relation to the theme of “Celebrate” was the lights, colors, and excitement of New Years eve.  So, I decided to play around tonight with making a new freemotion quilting pattern of fireworks to go along with it.  This is particularly appropriate here in Seattle, where New Years is celebrated with an incredible show of fireworks coming out of the Space Needle

“Fireworks” Freemotion Quilting design by Christina Fairley Erickson

The Fireworks design is fairly simple.  I started from the bottom, making a long curved line up to the top “firework” and mad a little circle there.  I then built outward- a line out with a little circle on the end, then traveling back down the line to the center circle, going around the center circle until there were multiple explosions outwards.  When I felt there were enough, I traveled back down the original line and built out one or more additional fireworks.

I don’t think you need to be too careful with this design, as fireworks leave additional streaks of light, so travel stitches don’t have to be too exact.

This design would also be good as dandelion seeds or a wispy, whimsical flower.

Thanks again for all the inspiration I’ve received in trying out freemotion quilting from Leah Day and her Freemotion Quilting Project.  By watching her videos and reading her blog regularly, I was able to come up with this design on my own!

Wish me luck… I have my 5 x 7 Challenge piece for the week completely pieced, but need to finish the quilting tonight before I reveal it tomorrow, and this one needs to be done by Wednesday morning, when the Fiber Funsters come to meet at my house!

For some fun quilting blogs go see:
Quilt Story
Freemotion by the River

You might also be interested in:

The Fiber Funsters 
10 x 16 Challenge		 Artistic Goals 2013 Juggling Many Projects

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Winter Project Time

Today was a fairly low-key day.  I’m trying to go along with Leah Day’s Freemotion Quilting Project focus on UFO’s each Sunday.  Today her FMQP blog post discusses getting negative reviews online.  I guess I’m kind of shocked.  I feel like Leah has given such a wealth of knowledge out for free and that she does a beautiful job.  Please stop by and give her some positive comments (if you haven’t seen her blog before, you really need to check it out!)

Back to UFO Sunday, here is the UFO that has been on my wall without progress for 6 months.  It’s a color progression with a contrasting curved piece through each block.  Although I don’t normally do block-based quilts, I wanted to practice some simple curved piecing and started on these 8″ squares.  I kind-of ran out of space on my design wall however and obviously haven’t finished up the curves in all the blocks I have up yet.

My thought has been to sew 1-2 vertical rows together at a time and then quilt them in those rows, putting the whole quilt together after doing the quilting.  I’m still struggling a little with how you put the quilt together after quilting, but want to try it out, since I hopefully have quilted my last king-sized quilt on my home machine after it was all pieced!  I’m thinking that using Leah Day’s “Mesh Curtain” pattern for the long vertical rows.

So, my commitment is to make some progress this week with this quilt, before the next UFO Sunday!

The other piece I’ve worked on today is my second week’s 5 x 7 Challenge piece.  I completed the paper piecing and now need to aapplique the center circle and rungs of the windmill blades, before I can start quilting it.

Beyond my indoor projects, my husband Randy and I, along with our two boys Ryan and Coleman and our dog Dexter, went for a winter’s walk at Marymoor Park in Redmond.  It was about 30 degrees and the frost twinkled on the trees and shrubs.

Reflections on the water
Partially frozen stream through the marshlands
Ice and frost in marsh grasses
Beautiful winter light and reflections
Christina with sons Ryan (left) and Coleman
(right) and Dexter (with the long ears)

Husband Randy with Dexter

Golden Hour at Penn Cove 
& Monet’s Haystacks		 What I Want My Children 
To Know		 Sunshine and Sand 
Design Inspiration
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CQA Surface Design Party

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Today turned out fantastic at our CQA meeting!  We had the following stations for making surface-designed fabrics to contribute to Stashfest:

Christina Fairley Erickson (me!): Shiva Oil Paintstick Rubbings, Stencils, Fabric Markers and Tsuneko Inks
Cameron Mason: Mono-printing with thickened dye
Colleen Wise: Thermofax silkscreening and foiling
Peg Swartzman: Oil Paintsticks with resists and stencil brushes
Kathy Cooper: Printing with Print blocks

Peg Swartzman teaching how to use Oil Paintsticks with
Freezer paper resists and stenciling brushes for an
elegant gradient effect

Cameron Mason (far right) teaching mono-printing with
thickened dyes to Roslyn Duffy (left) and Roberta Andreson (center right)
Roslyn Duffy’s mono-print with thickened dye
Flora Dalglish making Shiva oil paintstick
rubbings at Christina’s station

Debbie Babin designing with fabric markers after adding oilstick rubbings
at Christina’s station
Barbara O’Steen (left), Barbara Kanaya (center) and Debbie Babin (right)
working at Christina’s stenciling, fabric pens, and oil stick rubbing station
CQA President Marylee Drake (foreground) doing
Thermofax screen printing with Colleen Wise (background)
Some of our finished packets of fabrics to sell at Stashfest
We labeled each packet with the artist’s name who made the fabric(s), size(s),
and the processes used on each piece.


Stashfest Creator and CQA Member, Patricia Belyea
measured the fabrics and helped bundle them for sale

Want the chance to buy some of these wonderful fabrics?  Come to Stashfest April 6 and 7 up in LaConner!

You might also be interested in:

Making Fabric Viewing for Inspiration Making Fabric

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Support the La Conner Quilt & Textile Museum!

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Sketched in pencil first from a photo, then traced to
fabric and thread sketched by Carol

First, I want to share Carol’s first 5 x 7 Challenge piece. Check out Carol’s blog: LandscapeLady – Art Quilts from Vermont.  I think she’s done a wonderful piece and is working on a fantastic quilt of a dog in the style of David Taylor.

I recently saw a couple of David’s quilts at the Material Men show at the LaConner Quilt and Textile Museum.  They were truly breathtaking, at least for those of us who love pictorial / representational quilts.  The show featured 16 male quilt artists… not just because they are men, but because they are also exceptional artists.  I brought my husband and sons along to this exhibit and my husband was particularly intrigued with how he felt the men expressed themselves differently in the quilt medium than women do.  Some was thematic, some was stylistic, and some just gave a different impression or vibe than you might see at your local quilt show.

This evening I’m packing up my truck to bring a slew of surface design materials to the CQA meeting tomorrow morning.  We’re having a surface design party to make fabric to sell at Stashfest, a fundraiser for the LaConner Quilt and Textile Museum.  I made some last month with a few friends (see Making Fabric) and suggested to the group that we do it as a big group activity this month.  We’re going to have stations with thermofax silk-screening  Shiva oil paintsticks and rubbing plates, stencils with fabric markers for drawing and Tsukineko inks, foiling, and mono-printing with thickened dye.  We should have a wonderful assortment of fabrics to sell in April.

As part of my contribution to Stashfest, a tour of my studio will be up for sale!  Call “Stashfest Insider Visits” people can purchase tours of many different artist’s studios.  I’ve been working on studio organization, so now I’ll have to get really serious!

Last bit for this evening… I started a Fiber Artist Journey Facebook group, where we can also share photos and discussions.  Please click the link and “Like” the group to stay in touch!

You might also be interested in:

Making Fabric Viewing for Inspiration CQA Surface Design Party
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Designing for a Theme- Innovation Part 2

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You might want to start with a little history and look at Designing for a Theme: Innovation Part 1.

Artist rendition of Graphene molecules

With the topic “Fiber Artists Look at Innovation and Civic Action”, I personally decided to narrow down possibilities by choosing to represent innovation.  Since I’ve always enjoyed science, I started with looking at scientific journals and find out what some of the recent innovations have been that are expected to revolutionize areas of our lives.  This is where I found out about Graphene.

Graphene, a form of carbon only one atom thick and in a hexagonal cellular structure, is both the thinnest and strongest substance now known to man.  Scientists believe it will revolutionize technology from computer and mobile displays, medical devices, aerospace, desalination plants, electronics and countless ways which we cannot yet predict.  Since I’m a technology fan and my husband’s business is in aerospace, this seemed like a good place to start.  If you want to see a really cool futuristic video, check out this short YouTube “Future Applications of Graphene.”

So now I had a topic to try to represent to go along with the theme… but what could I do with it?  I decided I wanted to represent both the uniqueness of the material (thin, lightweight, hexagonal cellular structure) as well as some of the possible applications of the technology.

Another little aspect that I had to keep in mind was the unusual gallery space that this piece would (hopefully) be hanging in.  The walls were mostly all a deep dark forest green (with a hint of teal) and a couple that were a bright spring green.  Not exactly easy to hang anything on, but ok if you’re specifically designing for the backdrop color.

My idea was to have a thin sheer layer cut in a hexagonal pattern that would fiat above the quilt, which would be surfaced designed to tell more of the story. I started the quilted layer with white Pima cotton. I bought some plasticized wire garden fencing that had hexagons as its design, and started with placing it on top of the white fabric and spritzed jacquard Textile Paint through it. This created a resist, with a painted background (in blues and greens) with a shadowy faint white hexagonal grid.

Representation of a computer touch-screen made with a
thermofax silkscreen and hand-painted shading

I then created several black and white images from photos (using Photoshop) of things that will have future applications using graphene. These included a commercial airplane, computer circuit boards, a smartphone, and a computer touchscreen. I then turned these images into silkscreens using a thermofax machine. I layered these different images around on the background, using Versatex print ink.  I added some hand painting and when the paints were all dry, I finished the back/quilt with a diamond grid pattern for the quilting, as well as freemotion elements around each of the special elements.

Silkscreened computer circuit board with gold metallic
thread freemotion quilted to look like metal elements.

Now it was time to figure out how to represent the one-atom thick sheets of this hexagonal carbon molecule. I knew I wanted to have it be somewhat sheer (and black, since it is carbon, after all.) I thought that using a black organza might get the effect I wanted, so I bought some of each silk, rayon, nylon and polyester organza to test. I had a couple of different ideas on how to cut out a grid that wouldn’t ravel and could hold up, yet not be too terribly difficult or end up too uneven.

Some of my samples testing different organzas and ways to
cut and make sure they wouldn’t fray

The most consistent method and material turned out to be painting the nylon organza with matte medium, drying it, and cutting out the interior hexagons with small, sharp scissors. I’d been a bit surprised by this, thinking that a hot knife might cut and melt a synthetics edges at the same time, but it proved to be more difficult and harder to be exact than using my small Kai scissors.  Also, I tried treating with different products with varying degrees of success.  Some items made the organza too stiff (I wanted it still to be able to move in a breeze, to demonstrate the thinness of the graphene); others, like Fray Check, left a shiny plastic-like coating.

Close-up of grommet, copper pipe
& bead hanging mechanism
The organza hanging

You can imagine the time it took me to cut out each of the little hexagons on the finished piece!  The next step was to figure out how to affix the top layer so it would hang out separately from the quilted back piece.  This turned out to be quite tricky.  After many trials and errors, I was able to get a decent effect using some heavy-duty grommets, 1/8″ copper piping, copper wire, and beads.

Thankfully, my efforts were rewarded by the jury and my piece was accepted into the show!  Here is the final piece, hanging at the Seattle Center Next 50 Exhibition!  I particularly like how the hanging grid creates such interesting shadows with the gallery lighting.  The only disappointment to me was that the show chair who mapped out where each piece was to go, choose to put my piece on one of the couple spring green walls, after I’d designed it to go on the dark green ones!  Well, you can’t control everything!

“Graphene: The Miracle Material” by Christina Fairley Erickson
Whole-cloth 100% cotton background quilt hand-painted, silk-screened and machine quilted by artist.  Upper layer nylon organza treated with matte medium and cut into hexagonal grid attached with copper pipe, copper wire, beads and metal fittings by artist.

You might also be interested in:

Designing for a Theme… 
Innovation Part 1		 Designing for a Theme Journeys Show at 
SeaTac Airport
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Current Works in Progress

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Original sketched design

New week, new project. Well, actually one completely new, one just finished, and another in process. First, I started my next 5 x 7 Challenge piece, which I had sketched out last week.

Paper-piecing pattern

In thinking about how I could most effectively make this, I decided that paper-piecing would probably be the quickest with a nicely finished result. Since most of my art isn’t geometric, I haven’t had a lot of practice with paper-piecing.  

First section completed

This is where those of you who are familiar at this skill will probably laugh.  When you look at my pattern to the left, I have had to build each section with numbering.  However, I’m having to build parts of the sections on separate papers and then combine them, as my lines don’t all match up.  It’s seeming to work however.

“Opening” by Christina Fairley Erickson
100% Freehand Machine embroidered and Freemotion Quilted

I also just completed my first piece for the Fiber Funsters 10 x 16 challenge. Guess I’m all about the challenges this year! finishing off this dense freehand machine embroidery was more difficult than I expected. I decided to do a trap unto effect with a second layer of batting inside the lily, to have it stand out from the background. I then added the backing and freemotion quilted around the flower and in uneven horizontal lines over the blue background. Of course, I realized after doing a good portion that I could have just as well quilted from the back side since the flower was already outline, which would have made it possible to have even spacing of the lines. As it turned out, I couldn’t distinguish my quilting lines from all the thread of the background, which makes it a little less precise when you view from the back side.

“Opening” back – faced and freemotion quilted
See the white
on the edge?
The real difficulty came when I faced the piece and tried to turn the facing to the back. With such dense stitching, it was remarkably stiff and didn’t want to gracefully bend and hide the facing. Also, the process stressed it a bit and little bits of the white under-fabric were showing through.


The edge after painting
with fabric markers
See the difference/?
Well, I steamed and starched and pulled and cajoled, stay-stitched the seam allowance to the facing, and cut away as much of the seam allowance as possible.  I hand stitched the facing down, but still wasn’t fully satisfied with the result.  In the end, I dug out some fabric markers and ‘painted’ the edges and little white spots that shouldn’t be showing!  I think it did the trick!


My final piece to share is the second quilt for Fiber Funsters.  The word we’re using this time is “Celebrate!” as our theme.  I’m not sure what I think of this piece yet or if it has any promise.  I played around with some fabrics I’d hand-dyed and painted and this is how far I’ve gotten.  I don’t really know how I’m going to free-motion quilt it yet… But it’s supposed to be done in a week, so that gives me a little motivation!

“Celebration” – work in progress by Christina Fairley Erickson

You might also be interested in:

52 Weeks of Art The Fiber Funster’s 
10 x 16 Group Challenge		 2013 Open 5 x 7 Challenge




Blogs You Should Check Out!
For Fantastic Tutorials on FreeMotion Quilting go to The FreeMotion Quilting Project
Work in Progress Wednesday (Thanks Freshly Pieced!),
Link it Up Thursday  (Thanks Seven Alive!) and
 Can I Have a Whoop Whoop (Thanks, Confessions of a Fabric Addict!)
Off the Wall (Thanks Nina Marie Sayre)
TGIFF (Thanks Diane – FromBlankPages!)

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Week 1 of the 5 x 7 Artist Challenge

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For my first week of the 5 x 7 Artist Challenge, I completed a little freehand machine-embroidered piece that I’ve been thinking about for some time.

Freehand machine embroidered and quilted by
Christina Fairley Erickson

This zebra was adapted from a photo, drawn onto the fabric with pencil, then stitched on top.  It’s difficult to see in this photo (see enlargement below), but his mane has white stitching between the black parts, although I didn’t stitch the white over the rest of him.

My choice of fabric is all cotton, with an interesting weave (again tough to see in the photo)- nubby- sort of like raw silk.  This proved to be a factor in choosing the background quilting, as when I made some practice samples using different freemotion quilting designs, it seemed to look best with a more geometric style, rather than one that has lots of swirls or undulating pattern.  I think the grid works well to not compete with the main focus of the zebra.

Close-up of stitching.

I think the piece works for me… it was good practice both with the machine embroidery and the small-scale quilting.  The zebra is a natural extension of my equine quilts and passion.

Tomorrow I’ll finish up my story of the quilt show theme: “Fiber Artists Look at Innovation and Civic Action.”

Hopefully we’ll have a few other photos to post on our 5 x 7 Artist Challenge as well.  Remember, you can join at any time.  Post your photos to: http://www.flickr.com/groups/5x7_artist_challenge/

You might also be interested in:
2013 Open 5 x 7″ Challenge
Getting Started May be the Hardest Part
52 Week 5″ x 7″ Challenge to Readers

Other Blogs You might want to check out:
Freemotion by the River – Lovely Traditional Quilts and Projects
QuiltStory – Quilts and Patterns
From My Front Porch to Yours – Beautiful Home Decor Projects

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