Has anyone seen my elephant?

As soon as the Grey theme was announced I knew what I would do - a very textured close up portrait of the eye and wrinkled skin of an elephant.

So I got out a piece of elephant skin coloured fabric and some elephant skin coloured thread and some elephant skin coloured crayons and guess what - my elephant muse ran away.

Turns out that was not the quilt for me after all.

So last night I spent watching CSI and stroking fabric and pondering and now I know what I shall be making tonight.

Nothing to do with animals at all.

Maybe a touch of Africa though :)

Grey all over

I'm busily working on my grey quilt too. As convergence would have it, there's grey and yellow here, I was wearing grey and yellow while working on this, and I'm concurrently working on a grey baby quilt.

gray

I saw this artwork in Santa Fe last week and of course I thought of the 12 x 12 challenge! I really liked the idea of all the little bits of printed text, but felt the final result is a bit unfocused. I thought about what I would do for the challenge all through our trip and discarded at least 40 ideas. Today I actually started working on my piece. It is nothing like this!

Gray Play

I am happy to say that I am putting the final stitches into my gray quilt. Here is a peek at some of the fabric I have used in my quilt.

Across the Spectrum

I see that this month's virtual exhibit on the Studio Art Quilt Associates website is Shades of Gray curated by Leni Wiener. And the Art to Wear exhibit Twitchers all of a Twitter at the Sydney Quilt Show last week was based on a lorikeet palette.  Click the image for a slideshow:

Grayscale

I'm playing with the Grayscale tool in Photoshop to remind myself that any design can be made in grays.  It's all about value!

Grisaille

I've got the fabric.
Now I just need to make the quilt.

Not Quite Gray

This was so close.  I had a piece of black fabric in Dorothy Caldwell's class that discharged to white if you left the bleach on long enough.  Very cool, I thought, if I leave it on a litttle less time, it will be gray.

When I finished bleaching this, it reminded me of Monument Valley, so I just added a few lines of stitching to bring in the color of some of the rocks there.  I put it on the wall to photograph it, and now matter how much I tried to convince myself, it's not gray. It's tan, beige, coffee, khaki, but not gray.  So now I'm channeling my inner Dorothy again, and thinking of another class project to try out.

Book Signing at the Sydney Quilt Show

Here in Australia, I've yet to sight our book Twelve by Twelve:The International Art Quilt Challenge in a  real live bookstore but that will all change this week at the Sydney Quilt Show in conjunction with the Craft & Quilt Fair (22 -26 June) at Darling Harbour.

Specialist book vendor Can Do Books (Stand H21) will be selling our book and we are celebrating with a book signing at 1pm on Wednesday, 22 June.  I hope you can join us.  (I'm practising my autograph! and hope to also share some quilts.)

Festival of Quilts 2011 Features

Join Helen, Françoise and Diane at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham (11-14 August) and see all 144 art quilts from the Twelve by Twelve Theme Series. We can't wait to share our work with you.

Download:  Festival of Quilts Features (10.28MB PDF)

San Francisco Gray

Yep, it really looks this gray.  And this is a typical San Francisco summer day, I'm afraid. 

Tangled Textiles Today!

A few months ago, you might recall that we were somewhat instrumental in getting a new challenge group up and running.  During the 12 days of Twelves we posted, someone asked if others were tempted by reading about our experience to join a group.  Various people commented that they were, and so I contacted them and suggested they link up and form their own group.  They did so, under the name "Tangled Textiles", and today is the reveal day for their first set of quilts!

Their first them was "games."  Go check out their blog and see what delightful things they've come up with in response!

Gray Days

Gray days make good sewing days.

Making Gray

I have killed two birds with one stone, proverbially speaking.  For a City & Guilds exercise, I had to experiment with "paint pounding," where you scrunch up fabric, pound acrylic paint into it and then let it dry all scrunched up.  With "gray" just around the corner, I used that with pink mixed in for my experiment.

I used Dynaflow paint since I had that handy, and sort of mashed it on wet scrunched fabric so it looked like this.

You move it, wet and scrunched, into a plastic bag and try to keep it wet for a day or two so the paint has time to settle into the scrunches.  Then you take it out, let it dry still scrunched, and press.  And voila!

Actually this lower one is from the pinker scrunch pile above:

Great Minds

In researching for our current challenge, I came across these graphic prints in the Shades of Grey Range by Daisy Jane: Hmm, do I detect a theme?!