An Artistic Interlude

Haven't done much quilting in the past week or so - waiting for my last entry in the show to come back from the long-armer, and starting to build a Steampunk costume. I got the pants done in time for Costume Con this weekend (which I am attending), but it really needs a blouse and a jacket (and a hat and proper shoes) before I'll be happy satisfied with it. The pants are from  Folkwear's Big Sky Riding Skirt. I'll blog about that in the future, after I have some photos to show you.

In the meantime, I've been sketching. I have been rather obsessed with octopi for some reason. I did this one during a meeting the other day

And then when I got home that night, I dug out my vellum marker paper and freehand sketched this one with a fine-point sharpie. I may render this as a vector graphic.

I'll need to scan this in instead of photographing it with my crappy camera.

Iron Craft Challenge 14

As you may have noticed, I'm not quite so "Iron" in my Iron Crafting, as I've missed a few weeks here and there. It seems I can get one or 2 a month done, what with everything else that's going on in my life. This week's challenge is called "Wish You Were Here" and it was to create an postcard-sized Artist's card. Since I've been seeing a lot of fabric postcards online, and have been vicariously participating in a swap, and also after Elsa Hahn's fabric postcard demonstration at last weekend's Harvest Quilter's Guild show, I thought it was time I finally made one.

I used a 4x6-inch piece of very heavy Pellon interfacing (from the bolt I bought at JoAnn's at a 40% off sale that I use for purses and faux corsets for costume) and some of my favorite scraps for the fabric part of the card. Some Yellow Submarine fabrics, Laurel Burch cats, some batiks and a print I quite like made up my fabric collage.

I used some of the decorative stitching on my machine and some free-motion quilting and sewed all the pieces down. Once that was done, I glued the tiny quilt to a postcard backing - I used one of my (literally) hundreds of promo cards from my second CD release and sewed that together around the edges using a decorative stitch and a straight stitch (after the machine made a scary noise and I didn't bread a needle, but got paranoid).

Here is the result. Presenting "Fabric Postcard #1"

There will be more. Stay tuned.