36 Squares -- that's 1.20 x 1.20 m or 1.30 x 1.30 yd

 The planned width for this quilt is 1.3 yds, about single bed size, and 2/3 of the length are reached. As I tend to procrastinating boring jobs and to preferring the creative part, I demand from myself to finish all the sashing strips on front and back before I start the next rows for which I need more road-runners. The backing squares are mere jeopardy, I arrange the front and let the reverse follow.
I'll have to do a few printing sessions which is some fun. Lacking the birds, I inserted two tiger heads, hardly to be recognized.

First you create art quilts, then you learn to sew

Wonderful Heike teaches sewing in the same culture center where I showed my paintings,  she saw them and my quilts, and we got connected and started a conversation. I complained about my self-taught, rather poor ability of hand-quilting, and she said something nice about the art qualities of my quilts. So I enrolled for her sewing course to base my work on improved craft knowlege. She asked me whether this style of working might influence the spontaneous and creative side of it, but I don't think I have to worry, I rather see lacking experience as an obstacle to creative work. So I'm happy to learn from Heike. I chose a few fabrics from my favourite stash and decided to do a diagonal nine-patch with triangle corners in the quilt-as-you-go method. This is the start of a quilt I call Ba-Gua, referring to the 8 basic signs of the I-Ging Chinese oracle book. This one is "Water", connected to danger, black color, fish, kidneys, fear and pride.

Lovely batik scraps

From Chris Gray, I received a parcel with wonderful small batik pieces.
They are so beautiful that I wrote to Chris, I have inhibitions to cut into them, but she wrote back: "just get the scissors and go for it!"

Okay. I started with korak tiles which I can arrange and connect in the way of collecting, neither planning how large it will be in the end, nor which fabrics I'll find to make the backing and frame. I arranged the pieces on the red fabric which I cut about 2" larger than the final tile. I wrapped the edges twice towards the inside of the square and used small stitches to connect the parts. Again, this is hand-sewn from the front. This is a very good method for a quilt-as-you-go project.


And there is something else to show.

Judi Hurwitt has a beautiful photo of a hummingbird in her blog.
She kindly gave me the permission to use it as a template. I did this drawing and then one with a textile felt tip pen on t-shirt fabric. This was not such a good idea, the drawing did not turn out exactly as I wanted it to be. It is clumsy and awful, compared with the paper version. The fabric gave in to the pen movements, a not very satisfying result. But here it is, ironed and framed with a dark green fabric. I started quilting it.








T-shirt fabric is amazingly tough and resists my hand quilting; I think I'll not use that stuff again which is a shame because it reacts well on lino printing. Too bad it is so unpleasant to hand quilt.