The Tree Project

The International Fiber Collaborative will be assembling a full-sized tree in April. They will be needing up to 30,000 leaves made of fiber in some form. I am a fiber artist and so I grabbed some scraps and away I went....SO MUCH FUN!

I used darker strips on the back side so they would be reversible. The batting was lightly sprayed with basting spray and the strips were put down in a 'v' format. After quilting the strips in various swirls and squiggles, I used a freezer paper template leaf form to stitch around. I then cut away the excess and satin stitched the edges.
I am excited to send these in and then follow the project to see what happens. If you have some scraps and a couple of extra hours, be a part of a collaborative just for the fun of it.

Fractured Flowers

This past saturday, Valentine's Day, my fiber art group got together to unveil our 2008 challenge pieces....we gave ourselves flowers. Our challenge was to make four sections of a pink flower. Three of the four sections were then exchanged with others in the group so that you had 4 sections-one of them your own.
As if that weren't enough of a challenge, I made it more so for the 3 other people who received my sections. Somehow I misunderstood the parameters of the challenge and finished my sections-quilted, threadpainted, and embellished-before exchanging them. I am so sorry, again.
The challenges I faced with this were 1. the color pink-not my favorite 2. trying to find a way to fit the pieces together- especially since mine had batting already 3. how to expand on just a flower. Plus all of that, my pink sections didn't really match in values and hues. In the end, I am glad I challenged myself and I like the border I ended up attaching.

On our group's blog http://artrageousfibreart.blogspot.com/ you can see the flower we began with along with the other finished challenges. It was a lot of fun to see how everyone faced the challenge and creatively solved it. Enjoy!

Don't Go....

Have you ever been in a situation where you are making something for a challenge, swap, etc. and you realize that you absolutely love it and don't really want to send it? That is what happened with the piece you see below. It is a postcard made from a piece of tapestry with some beading...not very intricate but I love it.
It started out as part of a bigger piece that was trimmed down and so it became a leftover. I pulled it out a couple of weeks ago to enter it into a new life and fell in love with it's simplicity, color, and movement. Making this was good practice for the new piece I will eventually submit. I'm not usually worried about keeping something I love because I know another idea and /or design will come to me. This one took it's perfect place above my favorite wrought iron candelabra.