rubykittyruby

  Well, my Bank Holiday Monday got off to a nice start.  I've made a sale on Etsy.  I'd listed a patchwork quilt top, an English paper pieced one that I'd done ages ago but never got around to adding wadding and backing material.  I offered it for sale as a project someone else might like to complete, and it'd been listed for months, long enough for me to think only yesterday that I ought to take the listing down.  The amount I asked for the patchwork isn't anything much compared to the sheer number of hours paper piecing takes, but that's fine.  I'm more than happy to have it packaged up and ready to be posted to its new home.  Hopefully to be finally made up into a proper quilt and provide someone with warmth and a feeling of accomplishment.   I spent yesterday morning making this very speedy little fabric bowl.  It's a bit rough 'n' ready, but I can pass that off as boho style!!!  I cut a circle out of felt, then cut a strip of f...

This is my allotment, where everything's lush & green & growing like it's been put on fast-forward.  Sweet marjoram and mint are taking over the beds they've been planted in, and there are so many foxgloves in flower.  I did think about cutting some and bringing them home to put in a vase, but I always feel guilty if I do that, depriving the bees of their food. An hour and a half of mainly cutting overgrown grassy paths left me tired and a bit headache-y, so I've been spending time this afternoon messing about with paint and fabric again.   I applied paint to various pieces of cotton, calico and synthetic material, and while they don't look like much as yet they'll be prettier when this layer of paint's dried and I stencil over top of it.  I've got something in mind for these pieces, and it's a light bulb moment I had this morning while I was slurping tea and trying to fully wake up.  It's to do with two mini stylized dolls I made a while...

Over the last couple of days I've been sewing a fabric roll, using as a base this painted fabric.  These were scraps of mainly cotton that I painted and stenciled with acrylic paint, then machine sewed together.  It took me a while to figure out what I could make with this fabric rectangle, but I liked the idea of slow-stitching into it.  Because the paint had stiffened up the material I didn't need any interfacing, but just added a backing fabric and began sewing lines of running stitch up and down to give the quilted effect I wanted.   The only drawback was that, as I noted earlier, the painted fabric had stiffened due to the painted effects, so pushing a needle into it was harder than it'd be with fabric in its natural state.  I've never got to grips to using a thimble, so ended up with sore fingertips and some nicely developing callouses.  However, after a few muttered curses, I eventually quilted the entire piece.  Next I folded over roughly ...

  I said the other day that I'd post a photo of the ATCs - a total of 30 - that I made for a Facebook group swap.  Well, they're finally done and have been posted.  I'm glad to have got them completed before the deadline, even though some weren't exactly my best work.  Themes chosen by the group members were wide ranging and a few almost defeated me.  They included Buffy the vampire slayer, Victorian architecture (preferably done in pencil), life drawing (ditto pencil), a Harry Potter creature, Shane Warne, and a horror film character whose image I definitely didn't want lodging in my head.  I went a bit rogue with some themes, going for abstract images or - in the case of the pencil life drawing - just ignoring that and doing a version of a Matisse collage instead.  Sorry!  Overall, I don't think I'd take part in this kind of challenge again.  Partly because postage cost me £7.00, Royal Mail prices being as steep as they are, but also becaus...