Chickenshack Quilt -- finished at last

The Chickenshack mini quilt is finished. 17x17" with a new binding. It is the backing fabric, wrapped around the edges and sewn to the front with hem stitches. This means that backing and binding are one piece. The binding is a little crooked, but binding is something I'm learning at the moment. This piece is 100% hand sewn, printed, painted, and quilted. I'm thinking of selling it, but I'm not so sure, after all it was my first piece of this technique. Moreover, it was fused which made it awfully hard to do the hand quilting. Recently I read that the fusing material may create problems on the long run like a change of colors. I guess I'll try a similar one, not fused, for sale. It looks a little grey in the photos, but the cloth is dark blue and white. It suits the quilt better than it shows in the pics.

Thank you for keeping fingers x-ed

This morning, starting with a gesture of optimism, he was right indeed. They want him, they just aren't sure in which one of their houses. It is a large furniture store with numerous shops around Hamburg. They want him for a leading function. He said, the interview was perfect, friendly and harmonious. Mutual liking. He doesn't have a contract yet, but he's "inside", he said with conviction. "Munich is such a tiny dot on the horizon, getting smaller all the time", he added. -- And off he went to his old job.
The painting beside him is "Tea Tree" by Martin Harms, a German painter who lived and worked in New Zealand for more than 25 years. He is a close friend of my brother and gave me this painting.


Today I finished the chicken shack quilt, and it will be a cushion cover. The circular quilting around each bird has shaped the surface into a hill landscape. Which creates new ideas.

Dyeing studio

Today I used diluted fabric paints for dyeing the ground fabric. It is a heavy cotton twill. I cut a piece of 16x16" and gave it a shading of blue, violet, and cool caribean swimming pool.
Then I took out my fused things and ironed them onto the ground fabric to get this:

"Stampede in the chicken shack"
Two young black bears -- hardly visible, it is dark -- among the chickens in panic. I decided to use only 3 patterns. My first attempt looked too chaotic, as some of you noted in your comments, and I agree. This is not finished yet, of course. The fences will all be in the same pattern, and there is a gap -- upper right -- where the robbers came in. This will be a cushion cover with a zip. Don't tell all the people, I let our Afghani tailor do the sewing. If I do it, it will look as if he had taken it back from war.

Update. The fusing is finished. But I think I will not do more fusing in in the future than absolutely necessary. Because hand quilting is agony! Not due to the WonderUnder alone, but together with the strong twill, it becomes very difficult. Moreover, the beautiful quilting crincle will probably not appear on the fused parts. So -- should I bother? After all, I started...

A step into the unknown

Very often in a life as an artist we may come to road crossings without sign. A trodden path leads somewhere; we have decided to leave them, but we can never be sure about the meaning of what we do, neither about the result. And this is our choice.
I fused this thing. I can rip off the printed parts and make new compositions; I'm just trying to follow the idea of concentric squares. What do you think can be done to improve -- or rather: save -- this experiment?
I found that for the first time I started struggling with art. I used to drop what did not work. Let me tell you frankly: I don't like this thing at all. It is completely different from what I imagined.

Flowers for the Ladies: Peonies, Poppies, Pansies
We took a walk today. The flowers are overwhelming, all kinds with "p": peonies, pansies, poppies, and piris.

Chickenshack or "Mein Huhnchen soll es besser haben"

Made a few prints on paper: They illustrate a joke on an old maiden who had a chicken shack with 6 cocks and a hen. A neighbour asked her why she did not have a number of hens and one cock like all the other farmers; she said: "Well, in my youth, I was a wallflower. I want my chicken to have a better time!"













On the fourth print, a robber is in the shack, and the farmer seems to breed roadrunners. Gouaches, printed with lino stamps on paper. I exchanged the photos because the yellow paper wasn't shown correctly in the first series of photos.