Art to share

A few pieces of art I made for swaps recently.

Art quilt

I signed up for a Lucky Dip swap and decided to make another Mixed Media Art quilt. I really enjoy doing these even though they always end up wonky and completely different to what I thought when I first start. I only ever start with a rough idea of what I want to create, like a colour way or a feeling. I do like blue and green it has to be said, so my pieces very often end up in those colours. Well, as luck has it at the moment I'm working on an art quilt that actually includes pink! Now that's shocking to me too but I couldn't find a second background piece of fabric so I had to take what was on hand. On both quilts I used a baby wipe. I normally clean brushes with them or paint straight from the bottle. I added a little spritz of a colour spray and that's it for backgrounds. Throw on a few embellishments, add some meaningful words, a way of hanging it up, add some sparkly thing, try to take some off again, try and hide where things were taken off and sew on the Chinese tassel from Hongkong and voila! A piece of art!

Art quilts

I've made my first mixed media art quilts recently for a swap I joined. I had planned to do one for quite some while but didn't get round get started.
I made the butterflies out of silk cocoon strippings and silk throwster's waste, I had them laying around for a long time, never quite sure what to do with them. I also worried about the mess factor but as it turned out it wasn't too bad, I didn't dye the computer screen red again... The throwster's waste fibres were a bit more tricky to use but resulted in some lovely thin ethereal paper perfect for floaty butterflies. I also got a chance to finally use the pellon sheets I have had for ages which I used as the batting. That way the art quilt has some weight and strength to itself. For the background I made a simple fabric paper and coloursprays. On it's own it looked rather autumny but once I had added everything together it looked as spring like as I had envisioned it. To round it all up I added a few lines of a poem by Heinrich Heine.

I'm really pleased on how they turned out, they are fairly similar with only minor differences, that way is was easy to send one away. The recipient sounded happy about her little quilt too. Hopefully it brightened her day while it's still gloomy outside most days.