Hooking up with a Star

 

This is a hooky star: a prototype project for the village primary school. Working to the theme, "Christmas Unwrapped", the children were making decorations with recycled materials. Plastic bags cut into strips were to be prodded with blunt pencils into hessian. This one uses recycled mailing bags, as I had a small accumulation of them at home. An outline was dran onto the hessian, which was then filled with hooky/proddy. The edges were then cut back to a seam allowance whcih was folded and glued to the wrong side.

A Complementary Quiltie

 

A 5" quiltlet was made for another swap on Unlimited Textiles. I made use of a complimentary colour scheme: the orange really makes the turquoise sing. It is quite heavily stitched, kantha style, which I find meditative and calming in the execution, and of course embellished with beads as well.

A bird for Christmas

Not for the oven, but for the tree! I made two of these: one for a swap with the Unlimited Textiles group, and the other for my friend Veronika, who went home to the Czeck Republic for Christmas.

 

I had a lot of fun making these and, time permitting, it would be fun to make a whole flock to settle on the Christmas tree, with different markings and colours of plumage.

Stitching the Blues

 

I belong to a Yahoo group called Unlimited Textiles. These items were made to swap in November 2008 for the theme of "Feeling Blue", which, as you may have guessed, is well within my comfort zone. I worked one piece of strip-pieced and machine embellished cloth for both swap categories, a 5" quiltlet and two bookmarks. As the fabric was quite heavily embroidered, I decided to work simple tie quilting for the quilt. The book marks were backed in pelmet vilene which I had painted in fabric paints and heat set.

 

I used these projects to try out a new-to-me Madeira machine thread, Glamour, for which specific machine needles are sold. There was considerable variation between shades in their tendency to shred and snap despite using the correct needle and it was quite frustrating. The gold shade worked best for me on this occasion. I must play with them again to see if I can get them to behave better