Better late than never...

I know I'm one month late - but HEY! I finally made it! Here is my piece for the big and small challenge.

 

The title is "David and Goliath". The big gear wheel and the small one next to it are made up of small figures - pawns in the big clockwork of life. 

 

The gear wheels are all my original designs, digitized with the Bernina software and stitched out by machine on a background of hand dyed silk.

I enjoyed working on this one - it took me a long time to settle on an idea, but once that had happened, it just sort of fell in place all by its own. 

Now, while I'm at it, I might move on to the next challenge right away.

Updates on dates

Welcome, Marylou - we are very pleased that you chose to accept our invitation to join the group.

As Marylou Alexander has joined our group (see her website here), and we all might need it, too,  I would just like to post an update on deadlines and turns on giving guidelines/assignments:

As a reminder: deadlines are the end of October, the end of February and the end of June.

Ita (give new guidelines by end of October 2014), 
Kathy (give new guidelines by end of February 2014), 
Barbara (give new guidelines by end of June 2014), 
Gillian (give new guidelines by end of October 2015), 
Margaret (give new guidelines by end of February 2015)
Eti (give new guidelines by end of June 2015)Marylou  - (give new guidelines by end of October 2015)

We are done with the grey ones - technically speaking, because not every member has posted every finished result on the blog yet. We have received Barbara's assignment (if you missed it, you can find it here), marked in red, that's where we are at right now, with a deadline end of October. And the green ones are the next ones to give assignments, I have filled up the list until the end of 2015, to complete the year, including Eti and Marylou in their order of joining the group. Assuming we would just start with the same order again in 2016, but that's so far into the future, won't post that here yet.

Please remember: I need your finished quilts by the middle of March, 2015, for our first international appearance at Prague. That one is a real deadline!

Only two weeks late... Challenge 3 finished

After Kathy had left I got started on my assignment no. 3, which had been hovering in my mind for a while now. It all had started with this fabric which I just had to have when I saw it:

At first I thought I might give a part of it to Kathy for her birthday,  because she likes stripes so much, but when ideas started popping up in my mind I turned really selfish and decided I would keep all two meters that I had bought to myself.
First I cut 1" strips of the striped fabric and arranged them between dark blue strips that kept getting wider in quarter inch steps.

The narrow striped strips were folded in half and ironed, and sewn between the strips, extending out a little bit. Then I cut 2 wider pieces of unequal width, and 5 small strips in perpendicular direction, turned three of the narrow ones upside down and put it all back together.

Quilting is sparse - and due to my current strategy of avoiding having to sink threads this results in dangling ends of thread on the front.

Pulled all thread ends to the front, tied the pairs together approx.
half an inch away from the fabric, and then cut them to
approx. same length of "turned around my index finger once". 

Because the threads are not weighted,
they stick into different directions.

And good I did not to give any of this fabric away (sorry Kathy!) - I have more ideas and will probably use all of it up completely in a larger piece, once I have completed all my quilts for the exhibition in Alfeld in October.
This was fun - looking forward to starting on Barbara's assingment no. 4.

Three of us in Landshut

Barbara (left), Kathy (middle) and Uta

Inspired by new assignment

Not that I haven't been doing this before - but Barbara's new assignment certainly set me taking more pictures of patterns and structure. This is a selection from Berlin, couple of days ago.

Let's see what will become of these.