Skip to main content

Random patterns


Sunday has rolled around again.  A sunny June day, bees buzzing like crazy around the purple flowering sage in the front garden, popping in and out of foxglove bells, intent on finding food and paying me no attention.  I caught up on The Archers omnibus this morning - I was distinctly underwhelmed by the storyline about Jim's missing glasses.  Yup, he'd lost his specs, hold the front page! - then a mooch down to the allotment to admire the rapidly ripening strawberries.  

The afternoon was fairly aimless, a botched attempt at making a bag, I hadn't thought it through properly, and another chapter of the Alice Hoffman book.  This evening will be sewing and telly, and I probably won't shift far off the sofa. 

If you're wondering about the photo above, I was browsing on Instagram and came across a post from amandanadigart.  She'd cut out squares of plain fabric, then sewn on two randomly shaped scraps.  As she wrote:   'Stitch a shape on top of a shape.  Just one row of running stitches.  Then flip it, iron it and a new shape appears!  A new two toned shape!  A hybrid shape.  A compound shape.'  

So I thought I'd try it.  Might be fun.  Might not.  

A few dabs from a glue stick helped.  
Lines of running stitch for decorative effect and to keep the fabric in place.  
I made four squares for this practise piece.  (Practice?  I never know what the correct spelling is.)  The squares were joined together, I added polyester wadding and backing fabric, as well as binding.  
A closer look at the quilting lines.  
I think it's a good technique to use, picking out random scraps and using them to form equally random patterns.  I may try this again, using a different colour for the background, and perhaps slightly larger scraps, so you get little glimpses of the background instead of larger blank spaces. 
Crafting really is just playtime for adults, isn't it?  That's why we enjoy it.  

P.S.  Today's music for my June 'Year of Wonder' challenge was a bold, exuberant overture from Ruslan and Lyudmila by Mikhail Glinka (1804 to 1857).  

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Threads of Freedom and charity shop bargains

  It's Saturday afternoon, and I haven't done half the things I'd meant to.  Partly because I spent most of this morning messing about with paints, stencils and the gell plate.  Never mind, everything on today's 'To Do' list will join tomorrow's 'To Do' list ... it's hardly life or death if I don't haul the hoover around the room or pull up weeds in the front garden.   I thought I'd show you what I made on Wednesday.  I'd gone to my monthly StitchArt group, and this time we did something a little different.  There's a project called 'Threads of Freedom' which is working with various community groups across the city.  It's about creating little stitched pieces, some of which will be included in a textile panel to go on display at Leeds art gallery.  There was lots of fabric we could choose from to sew with, and I picked this vintage tray cloth with the roses embroidery.   My own embroidery's not a patch on those flo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Another week's flown by ...

  Saturday's rolled around again, and it's not been the most eventful of days.  Cleaning and hoovering, a walk to the shops to buy groceries, an hour on the allotment, then home to do some odd tasks in the garden.  The strawberry plants are sending out runners, so I've been dealing with those, plus deadheading the perennial sunflowers, and cutting back the gone-over flowers on the sage and marjoram.  I'm sad to see those blooms gone as the bees loved them.  This afternoon I spent a few hours finishing 'Dawnlands' by Philippa Gregory.   It's a really good book, a page turner where you care about the characters and want to be reassured everything's going to work out well for them.  Plus you become enraged about the corruption of the so-called justice system at the time of the Stuart kings and queens, about transportation of prisoners to the West Indies, and about the vile nature of the sugar trade in the 1600s and the vast profits made from it....
Post a Comment
Read more

Folding a zine and an alternative use for a bank card

  Hello again, and excuse me while I scratch my insect bites.  I don't know what it is, but at this time of year I'm invariably itching like crazy because I've been bitten by bugs.  It seems to coincide with blackberry-picking season, but whether that's purely coincidental I don't know.  Whatever's biting me, I'm obviously a tasty morsel in their world!  I might try using a highly scented oil like Tea Tree oil, see if that deters them.  Anyway, let's get on to more pleasant matters -  I'm having a go at making a zine style booklet.  Because I didn't have any paper large enough, I joined together two A3 sheets of sketchpad paper, using torn pieces of book pages for the joining.  I thought that'd look less noticeable than packing tape or similar.  Having chosen my colour scheme I used acrylic paint and an unwanted plastic bank card to apply the paint.  Plus a stencil, sponge and modelling paste.  Applying paint with a ATM card wa...
Post a Comment
Read more