Guest Blog Post at Scarf It Up!

Good Morning Everyone!  And Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I am thrilled and honored today to have been asked by my sweet friend Louise Giordono to be a guest blogger on her Scarf It Up blog today.  Please hop over and read my post on Crazy Quilting!

Guest Blogger - Mary Anne Richardson

I honestly can't remember when or how I met today's guest blogger.  I feel like I've know her all my life!  She was so very kind to me when I had my breakdown.  She sent me so much love & encouragement and so much comfort.  I've admired her work for quite some time now.   She has much to share in today's post so I will stop rambling here.  Please welcome my dear friend and today's Guest Blogger, Mary Anne Richardson of Magpie's Mumblings blog.

Pam has asked me to tell you a little about how I made my own walnut ink and to show you a little of the work I do. Thank you for having me Pam!


Walnut ink is really simple to make. All you need is to fend off squirrels while you collect about 20 black walnuts! It doesn’t matter if they are damaged in their fall from the tree, because they will look a whole lot worse when you’re finished with them! I put mine into a plastic bag and then used a hammer to crack them a bit. Place the walnuts (including the shells) in either an old slow cooker or a large pot that you don’t plan to use for food later on. I don’t know if black walnuts are toxic, but it’s better to be safe. Cover the walnuts with water and simmer for approximately eight hours (keep an eye on it to be sure the liquid doesn’t evaporate too much). The walnuts will turn black and your liquid will become a rich dark brown. I strained the liquid off, saved it, and the next day I added fresh water and re-cooked the same walnuts (only because I was curious to see what would happen – you don’t have to repeat the process if you’re happy with the amount you made the first time). I then re-heated the liquid and poured it into hot canning jars. I made sure the lids were hot in order to have a good seal on my jars. I’m not sure that all the care with the sealing of the jars was necessary but I wanted to be sure my ink didn’t have a chance to spoil. Now I will use it to either dye fabric or paper. I ended up with five jars of walnut ink with very little effort. It’s perhaps not quite as saturated with colour as the walnut ink you can buy commercially, but certainly the price is right!!

Now I will tell you a little bit about me and my creative life. I really don’t know when I haven’t been doing something creative, but my earliest memory of my first project was years ago when the huge granny square afghans were ‘in’. My aunt made several and showed me how to start off. The pattern was simple – one gigantic granny square which you went round and round until you were heartily sick of the process! I hated that afghan, however I did love crocheting and still do.


From there I progressed into macramé and, I think, horrified every person on my gift list that Christmas by giving them horrible jute plant hangers – complete with ceramic pots (another phase I went through). Looking back I realize just how horrible they were! A few people were brave enough to hang them up but most of them I never saw again. Needless to say, macramé was not my forte.


Over the years I think I probably have tried pretty much every craft going – leatherwork, tatting, knitting, beadwork – you name it, I’ve tried it. I decided a number of years ago that knitting would be my ‘thing’ and, being a generous soul, I undertook to knit a pair of socks for my husband. The nice lady at the yarn shop assured me that the pattern was quite easy and if I started them right then (it was October) I would definitely have them done for Christmas. Well, I knitted. And I knitted. And I knitted some more. I knitted on those socks every spare second I had for weeks. Christmas came and I presented my husband with ONE complete sock and the ball of wool for the second one. After Christmas, I knitted and (well, you get the picture). There endeth my knitting career – or so I thought. Fast forward twenty years, and guess what I like doing now? I’m not good at it, but I do enjoy it. My best effort so far has been to make at least a dozen pairs of felted slippers. As for socks? Nope – not going there!!


I was bitten by the crazy quilting ‘bug’ in the early 90’s and it is now my first love. It combines so many techniques, all wrapped up in one beautiful package. I stumbled across a book by Judith Baker Montano and my obsession began. I rapidly discovered the cheapest place to get fabrics for use in crazy quilts was the thrift store. At that time I could pick up beautiful silk blouses for about two dollars which was w-a-y cheaper than buying yardage. Vests, skirts, blouses – all became fodder for my projects. Then came trading bits of fabrics with people I met online to expand my collection.


My next discovery was that there were a whole lot of people out there who were anxious to trade their work with me – either an entire block or in the form of a round robin. What a learning experience that was – I rapidly found that in crazy quilting ANYTHING that can be sewn down is fodder for use (broken jewellery, bead necklaces, brooches, buttons, coins – the possibilities are endless). It’s possible to glue things onto a piece too, but I don’t generally do that mainly because I don’t trust glue to hold over the years.

Art Dolls are another love and last year I took part in an exciting project – the Art Doll Coolaberation 2009. It worked in a similar way to a round robin with each participant creating a basic doll body and the rest of the artists adding to it and also telling a story about the doll along the way. It was great fun and a total learning curve. Being able to see how others work and what they create is so exciting! We had so much fun that we have begun another project this year. Can’t wait!


Here’s a photo of Shudayra, the doll that came home to me from the ’09 Coolaberation...

More of the dolls I’ve made...

My other passion is to make things using recycled denim jeans – mostly bags and jackets. I took a class several years ago about how to make the basic jacket and then I’ve gone on and added my own twist. They are in the crazy quilting style with lots of button clusters, recycled pockets, and labels for decoration. I’ve made over thirty jackets so I guess they must be well-liked!

A couple of years ago I joined in the colour challenge with SharonB and made a block each month using the colours Sharon suggested. Many of them turned out to be so different from the colour combinations I would normally have used, which was good for expanding my confidence. The blocks were eventually turned into three wall hangings and are the ones you see pictured with this article.

Thank you once again to Pam for inviting me to visit with you today. I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing a little bit of my work and would love to have you visit me at my blog (http://magpiesmumblings.blogspot.com). Please say hi when you’re there!

I would like to thank my sweet friend Mary Anne for taking the time to put this post together.  Mary Anne's work is phenomenal and I just knew my blog followers would enjoy her.  Thank you so much Mary Anne!!

I'm going to put my Guest Blogger Feature on hold now until after the holidays.  I know everyone is going to be busy for awhile now.  I'll resume this feature after the New Year.

Guest Blogger - Lilla Levine

I first saw Lilla's work at Art-E-Zine.  I was blown away!  I loved her textile art and her use of dyed lace!  Lilla's work was a huge inspiration to me and a big part of my desire to try crazy quilting.  Something that is unique to Lilla is that she lives in Hawaii.  When I invited Lilla to be my guest blogger this week, I asked if she would talk about living and crafting in the beautiful state of Hawaii and she graciously agreed.  Please welcome Lilla Levine!

Hawaii, Islands in the remote Pacific ocean.

Aloha, I'm Lilla.
I live in the Islands of Hawaii.
I am sure most people know the tourist attractions and palms waving photos, easily found in travel ads.
 

Tourist Hawaii ,we call it, and most famously that means Waikiki.

Very friendly and fun, they enjoy sharing their studio and their products.

My first stop, was a quaint little shop and studio, where all sorts of classes take place.
I sometimes teach there too.
Some goodies made by we artists who enjoy the ambiance there.
After a short stop I had coffee at a pretty cafe, passing a local spot with workers having their break.
This is the place to by beads and lace and ribbon and trinkets galore.                                                                                    
Aloha and Mahalo Lilla

 

I'd like to thank Lilla Levine for taking the time to write this guest post.  I hope you enjoyed visiting Hawaii and Lilla's post on living in this beautiful state.  Please visit Lilla's blog to see some of her gorgeous textile art!  And then hop over to Lilla's Etsy shop to see what she offers there. 

Guest Blogger - Allison Aller

It's the 15th of September and that means, that I have another Guest Blogger to introduce you to.  I met Allie years ago through our mutual love of crazy quilting.  I have always been taken with Allie's fearless use of color and her beautiful embroidered landscape quilts. 

Landscape quilts are so unique and no one does them better than Allie!  When I invited her to be a guest here on my blog, I asked if she would discuss her process.  Please welcome my dear friend, Allison Aller of Allie's In Stitches.

Portraits of Place in Crazy Quilts

My dear friend Pam has invited me to guest blog today on the subject of creating "place portraits", created by embroidering over photo-transfered imagery, in crazy quilting.  I've enjoyed stitching these for the past several years and am glad to share my experience.  You might like making one too.
The reason I call these "portraits" is because these finished pieces reflect not just the visual representation of a place, but also the stitcher's feelings about it and love for it.  Your stitches as they integrate with the photographic image on fabric create a rendition of your subject that is yours alone.  It doesn't have to be slavishly realistic, either, as many portraits are not!  What matters most, I think, is that you have passion for the place you are portraying.

This is not a technical article but just a description of the process I use to create a place portrait.  Links for relevant technical tips as well as relevant supply sources will be given at the end of the post.

The basic steps are as follows...

Preparation of the Print onto Fabric:

1)  Choose a photo of your home, garden, or a landscape you wish to have as the central image of your portrait. 
2)  Transfer your photo onto fabric.  There are many ways to do this and in fact several whole books on this subject! (1; see below)  What I like to do is print my digital photographs onto commercially prepared cotton or silk fabrics that are ready to run through my printer and accept the pigment inks I prefer to use.  Epson printers use pigment inks; HP uses dye-based inks.  I have found that the dye-based inks fade too much over time to be satisfactory. 
The products I like best are EQ Printables for cotton, and Color Plus Textiles for silk (2)  Be aware that the cotton is harder to stitch through than the silk, as it is tightly woven.  The silk, however, does not yield as vivid as a print, colorwise.
3)  Once your image has been printed, rinsed, air-dried, and ironed according to the package instructions, I find it extremely useful to interface the back of the print with fusible knit interfacing.  This stabilizes the printed fabric for stitching.
4) In order to prevent "over-handling" of the print while stitching on it, I like to machine baste 3" strips of muslin around the perimeter of the print.  This is temporary, but will prevent the edges of the print from being stretched out or frayed from handling during stitching.

Embroidering Your Portrait

The main concept to keep in mind when choosing your embroidery threads is the relationship of the scale of the threads to perspective in the portrait.  What I mean by this is this: the father away, or in the distance in the photograph the area you are stitching on, the thinner your thread should be.  The thickest threads belong in the foreground of your portrait. This helps a lot to give the illusion of depth to your scene.  I never embroider anything in the sky; in real life, of course, the sky is so much farther away than any landscape element that it appears totally flat....so I like to keep it that way in my place portraits.  Flat, flat, flat!
Also, it makes sense to start your embroidery in the background areas, and then move to the midground with your stitching, and finally, to embroider the very foreground area.

Let's have a look at some projects...

My first attempt at using this approach was for a quilt called "The Home in the Garden".
Here is the photograph I used.  It's my garden in July!

I cropped it, printed it onto cotton, and began developing it with embroidery. In this picture the evergreen on the left, the tree behind it, and the pink sweet peas on the left have been stitched.

Here is the embroidery a little further along.  You can see I have sketched out where the outer edges of the finished embroidery will be.  I have used stitches with the most dimension in the foreground--French knots and bullions for flowers, while simple detached chain stitches and fly stitches work well for foliage.  Straight stitches in the proper scale and color work perfectly well in mid to background stitching.

An interesting phenomenon is that the viewer's eye and brain will "blend" the photographic and stitching details so that the mind really reads this as one consistent image.

I like to frame my portraits with crazy piecing and stitching, but I try not to let that get too busy, so that the portrait in the center keeps the viewer's main focus.  Staying with one color in the piecing helps, as is keeping the seam treatments simple.
The final size of this piece is 16" X 16".

This next project is shown actual size.  It is a 2" covered button!
The stitching is obviously all in the foreground; you will notice (if you look closely) that the trees behind the cottage were not stitched.  That would have brought them too much  into the foreground, no matter how fine a thread I had used.

I used this same subject, the old family cottage, for a couple other portraits.
 
In the first photo, you can see the initial embroidery of this small scene.  I went for a more "impressionistic" look this time.

As always, the foreground stitching was added last.

The finished piece, measuring 8" X 8", again had a simply crazy pieced and embroidered "frame", with an inner border of rocks that were gathered from the beach below the cottage.  This piece is mounted on foam core. (3)

The next cottage portrait was much more elaborate.  I used a larger printed central image, which was 10" X 13".  There were also other printed photographs integrated into the piecing around the central image, which formed more than just a frame, but a much larger compositional context for the center.
This was technically quite difficult!

I started with many prints laid out roughly in the positions I thought I would be using them.

Fast forward now to where the quilt is pieced and the outer piecing is starting to be embellished.  Notice that some of my piecing seams were deliberately designed to act as tree trunks and branches, once they were embellished.

These buttonhole leaves were inspired by the great work of Lisa Boni of http://ivoryblushroses.blogspot.com/
She makes the best buttonhole leaves ever!

The final embroidery of this central image was fairly light-handed.  I outlined all the major architectural shapes of the cottage, highlighted the flowers in the border in front of it, and did lots of straight stitching in the grass in the foreground...and also spent three days making all those buttonholed leaves.  ;-)

Each project and image will guide you as to what kind of embroidery needs to be done:  you will discover that for yourself. 
This whole quilt took about 4 months to make.  It measures 30" X 30".

This summer I decided to do another garden portrait, again using the procedure described at the beginning of this post.
One difference in this project, called "High Summer", is that once it was finished, I mounted my embroidered central image onto fusible craft batting before appliquéing it over my crazy pieced "mat".  (4)
This gave me a nice smooth edge, "stretched" the embroidery so that it was flat, and caused it to be just slightly raised above the surface of the quilt.

Here is "High Summer" completed.  Again, the frames are kept to a single colorway in order to showcase the central embroidered image.

This is 18" X 22".

Finally, I want to mention that there is an alternative to inkjet photo transfer that I sometimes use to get my image onto fabric.  Transfer Artist Paper, or TAP, is an updated version of the old Tshirt transfer paper.  You reverse the image you wish to use on the computer, print it onto the TAP, and then iron it onto your fabric.
You get a sharp print easily with really good color...the only hitch is that it is harder to stitch through than inkjet printed fabric. (5)

"June" was made using the TAP.  It is small, about 10" X 12".

If you are inspired to try this approach with a "place portrait" of your own, I would really love to see it.  Drop me a jpg and a note about your project at aaller@gmail.com.
Thanks!

Resources:
1) Several books on photo transfer published by C & T are here:
http://www.ctpub.com/showproducts.cfm?WPCID=1126
2) EQ Printables is here:
http://www.electricquilt.com/Shop/Printing/Fabric8.asp   *Note*  The Cotton Lawn is easier to stitch through than the Cotton Sateen.
Color Plus Fabrics are hard to find but a good source is here:
http://www.outofmymindprints.com/fabric.htm  I especially like their silks, but all their fabrics are great.
3) See my article in CQMagOnline for how to mount small quilts onto foam core.
http://www.cqmagonline.com/vol07iss02/articles/806/index.shtml
4)  I like Fast 2 Fuse from C & T, as it has fusible web on both sides and is just the right weight.
http://www.ctpub.com/productdetails.cfm?PC=896
5) find TAP at many online sites; just Google it!


I'd like to thank Allie for taking the time write such an informative and interesting blog post for my readers.  Please take a moment to hop over to Allie's blog and say hello to her.  Allison's work is pure perfection.  You will never be disappointed in the eye candy you find on her blog.  Thank you dear one!