My word, is it it really 19 January?  Where does the time go?   I have managed a bit of creativity - I've been making Artist Trading Cards and you can read me wittering on about them over on Very Berry Handmade today. Thank you so much to Ali for having me!

There has been other activity which I'm showing you because who could resist a lamb having a bath?  (No stew jokes, please.)

Goodbye 2015, Hello 2016

First of all HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone who puts up with my infrequent rambling.  Thank you especially for your friendship and encouragement and I hope that your coming year is full of fun and creativity!

These are my favourite makes of 2015.

Clockwise from top: Mrs Midas, Wild Geese, The Moors, Birch, Home Sweet Home: Waiting to be Let In

It was a quiet year creatively because the rest of life was mad:

1 graduation from primary school
1 total house reorganisation
2 bedrooms completely redecorated

1 funeral: odd how bittersweet these events can be - so very sad whilst simultaneously so nice in terms of meeting up with relatives one doesn't see very often
1 lovely week in Arran, during which there was
1 flood - through the ceiling of one of the newly redecorated bedrooms:-(
1 insurance claim
3 weeks in temporary accommodation and three months of living in chaos

Highlight of the year was renting a little studio and a lot of days were spent scraping old concrete off the original quarry tiles, and painting the breeze block partition wall.

Finally, I mustered some courage and entered two quilts to Quiltcon - Wild Geese and Walk, Don't Walk - neither of which were accepted.  I know I have to improve my technical skills so I just look forward to keeping on experimenting.

Please join me in 2016!

Wild Geese

So this is my latest quilt which I sweated over solidly for the last week and a half, partly out of a mistaken conviction that Friday was 30th November  (the deadline for Quiltcon entry).  The quilt was made using all but a few scraps of the fabric I received for taking part in the Michael Miller Fabric Challenge (some for the geese and the rest for the scrappy binding), and I'm entering it in that category at Quiltcon.

The quilt is a play on the idea of the flying goose block.  I had in my mind one of the beautiful skeins of geese you see flying south across the winter sky.  The main difficulty, which only a quiltmaker would understand, was how to position the seams.   It looks simple, but the construction was complicated as none of the geese are in alignment with each other.

I emphasised the dual nature of the geese by leaving the blocks unquilted except round the triangles to hold them in place, which meant burying about 140 thread ends.    Because the geese don't line up I had to quilt it in several sections - there are only two places I could  sew right down from top to bottom.

The thing I am most proud of is persevering in the face of an ongoing conviction that it wasn't going to work out, especially when I realised that the back was going to show through to the front and I had to resort to using two layers of batting.  All the things I make go like that - I'm sure I'm not alone! Anyway, I'm currently high on quilt completion euphoria, but I don't want to look too carefully at the other #michaelmillerchallenge quilts on Instagram as they are really wonderful.

It's the first time I have ever entered anything I have made for show.   For anyone who doesn't know, it's juried entry; that is, your quilt is considered and might be rejected at the application stage, so I'm hoping for the best.    I will be a bit disappointed if it is not accepted, but on the other hand I have made a quilt I wanted to make and learned a lot in the process.

PS does anyone know what to do about a crinkly bottom? :-)

I've done quite a lot of relief and intaglio printing over the years but my one experience of screen printing a long time ago was a bit of a disaster. Recently though I've started thinking about transferring ideas to fabric (partly inspired by the work of Elizabeth at Bottle Branch) so I wanted to come back to it and have another go.

This weekend I was lucky to go on a day course learning to screen print on fabric with Karen Lewis, at Jo myBearpaw's shop.

During the day we learned how to make a straightforward screen that would be easy to assemble at home, and had plenty of time to design and print two different patterns.

It was fun to see such a variety of styles among the group - you can see us, and our work, on Karen's blog!

If you can't get to one of her courses, the process is described in her book Screen Printing at Home, which is full of inspiration.

(Amazon affiliate link)

Karen was a lovely and enthusiastic teacher and the whole process was completely addictive.  I came away completely buzzing with ideas and can't wait to do more.  I have a plan for the trees too.

Four in Art 4: Birch

With many apologies again to my Four-in-Art friends for my lateness, I'm dropping in to share my quilt for this quarter, Birch. Our group has been working this year on the theme of Literature, and my fourth quilt is inspired by Anna Karenina by Tolstoy.  It's a really wonderful, atmospheric novel, full of the most human characters (and, bonus, its a whole lot easier to read than War and Peace).

I wanted to make a quilt about the power of a book to evoke a particular image or feeling.  I last read Anna Karenina quite a long time ago - on the Trans-Siberian railway, in midwinter - and the image in my mind has always been of snowy birch forests.  I had a look back at the text of the book when I started my quilt and could only find one reference to birches, so my memory of the book is probably all muddled up with memories of the journey, but never mind!  That's the image I had in my head.

I wanted to make each of my four quilts for this series progressively more abstract.  This quilt has turned out less abstract than I intended, but it's still ambiguous.  It could be a forest of birches,

or it could be the bark on one birch trunk.

It is heavily quilted to suggest more trees, or bark texture.

The 'coloured' strips are the same fabric as the body of the quilt - I cut a large section and ran backwards and forwards with variegated aurifil before cutting and piecing it.

To be honest, I'm not sure this quilt is really finished, but it completes my four on the theme of "Literature" with Four in Art.

The Moors: inspired by the works of the Bronte sisters, about the use of
weather and climate in literature to heighten mood

Haiku: inspired by a poem by Basho, about deceptive simplicity and
whether we have to 'get' all the references to enjoy a work

Mrs Midas: inspired by the poem by Carol Ann Duffy, about vivid imagery

We have a shared blog here, and you can find the other quilters here:

Betty on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com
Elizabeth at Occasional Piece
Nancy at  Patchwork Breeze
Rachel at The Life of Riley
Simone at Quiltalicious
Susan at PatchworknPlay

We are a friendly group, who all have very different styles and approaches, who come up with an overall annual theme to work on, sometimes with quarterly sub-themes for extra inspiration. The group is kept to a size where we are close enough for us to communicate easily with each other, but a spot sometimes opens up so if you're interested in joining let me know in a comment below.

All members have to do is:

• Desire to expand their creativity. 
• Have a body of work that members can review, preferably a blog.  
• Make a year commitment to the group and do their best to make deadlines unless some crazy life occurrence happens. 
• Be willing to review other Four in Art work and leave a comment within the first week of publishing.

Four in Art

The Knotted household has been living in chaos since a leak through one of our ceilings back in the summer.  We are almost back to normal, but dealing with the fall-out means my contribution to Four-in-Art this quarter is going to be delayed. Thanks to my fellow Four-in-Arters for being so kind and understanding!

Please do visit the other participants at the links below.  This is our last quilt of the year inspired by the theme of 'Literature'.  Each of us has taken this theme and run with it in our own way, and seeing how everyone else has responded to it has been such a lot of fun.

Betty at a Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com

Elizabeth at Occasional Piece

Nancy at  Patchwork Breeze

Rachel at The Life of Riley

Simone at Quiltalicious

Susan at PatchworknPlay

Mrs Midas: A Four in Art Quilt #3

I'm here to share my latest contribution to Four in Art.  I'd like to introduce Mrs Midas:

Mrs Midas
A Four-in-Art Quilt, August 2015
No 3 in the 'Literature' series

This quilt was inspired by the poem by Carol Duffy, which you can read in full here.  The poem comes from a collection called The World's Wife, in which Duffy examines, sometimes very comically, the lives of the women behind a collection of famous men.  Mrs Midas is a poem from the point of view of the wife of a modern Midas, "the woman who married the fool who wished for gold".

It's full of beautiful and vivid imagery, and terrible sadness.  Unable to embrace his wife any longer Midas has to move out to their "caravan in the wilds, in a glade of its own".

"You knew you were getting close.  Golden trout on the grass...And then his footprints glistening next to the river's path."

The colours that the poem evokes are what influenced my quilt - I really wanted to get across the feeling of the gold, beautiful but unexpected in contrast to the greens of the grass and the wooded glade.  It is made using various kona and klona cottons and some gold silk dupion, and quilted simply in the ditch.  I had quite clearly in mind some ideas - the (rather wobbly) flying geese which represent Midas's footprints in the grass, and the stylised applique leaf - and I knew I wanted to make an improv quilt, and for it to be abstract, which fits in with my plan to make each quilt in the series progressively more so.  (My previous two quilts are here.)

I'm not satisfied with the pictures of this quilt and I want to take it outdoors when the weather is more reliable, but I do love it. There are many practical details I would fix but I managed to get out what I had in my head!

Watch out for the reveal of our final quilts on 1 November but meantime please do visit the other participants and check out their quilts for this round of the series.


Elizabeth at OP Quilt  

Betty at a Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com

Jennifer at Secondhand Dinosaur 

Nancy at  Patchwork Breeze

Rachel at The Life of Riley

Simone at Quiltalicious

Susan at PatchworknPlay