Behind the scenes

Maybe because I'm such a slow worker I occasionally feel hesitant to show too much of a work in progress, like I don't want to reveal it until it's done!  But I thought I should give a little peak of some of the stuff that's going on behind the scenes.  Do you ever sometimes think that the back of your piecing is strangely beautiful, however roughly finished?

The finished quilt will be made almost entirely of half-inch squares; four thousand, six hundred and eight of them to be precise.   I'm getting there.

It's been a bit silent on this blog recently because I've been a bit busy.  If you have been reading my blog for a while you know that I had the opportunity to rent a little studio last year.  Sadly, the big-style collapse of our car just before Christmas left us with a studio/car dilemma which was obviously resolved in favour of a car.  C'est la vie.  I feel so lucky to have been able to try the studio experiment - it was just lovely to have a space of my own where I never had to tidy up in order to get the dinner on!  I just couldn't justify the indulgence though.

All is not lost!  We are kind of shoe-horned into our house, but we have a walk-in cupboard off the dining room that once looked like this...

Spot the family height marks - if we ever move I will have to tear off the doorframe.

A lot of relocation of stuff, a bit of work,  a table made out of two old wardrobe shelves, and it now looks like this!

It's 97 centimetres wide but it's a palace to me!

Forgot to show you

My quilt backs are usually uninteresting because I generally rely on something economical like good old Ikea Nummer (heard a rumour that it was going out of print, but it's still available, phew) so I have rarely shown them but forgot to post this one which I actually really love.  It's the back of Wild Geese, which I made with fabric gifted by Michael Miller to people taking part in last year's 'Glitz' challenge, and as the back had to use Michael Miller fabric I put together all the bits left over from the front, together with three other fabrics from that range.

It's hard to capture the lovely sheen of these pearlised fabrics - the result is subtle and pretty rather than brash.  It would actually make an okay front without the ghost geese from the quilting on the front, but I like them anyway.

What with the various storms we have been having and the fact that we seem to live in a small localised wind vortex it was hard to keep this from blowing away while I took pictures, which is an embarrassing enough process when you are overlooked by all the neighbours' windows.   It was more successful than my attempt to take pictures of Building Blocks, when I rushed outside to catch a rare moment of favourable light despite being desperate for a pee (TMI?), locked myself out of the house resulting in having to pull my daughter out of maths, and then dropped the quilt in the mud.

Also forgot to post this little artist trading card, though you might have seen in on Very Berry Handmade. Its new owner seems to be happy with it.  

There is lots of ATC loveliness in the Very Berry ATC group on flickr.

Four in Art - "Colour: microscopic"

The theme chosen for this year's Four in Art quilts was Colour, and this quarter the sub-theme is 'Microscopic'.

'Colour' and 'Microscopic' are great themes - such a lot of food for thought!  I started by thinking about colour in connection with microscopy, microscopic specimens and so on, particularly the use of stains to highlight different parts of a specimen.

I considered making a quilt based on a coloured cross-section of a stem, which would have been nice as my dad is a botanist who spent his career looking at specimens down an electron microscope.  However, I really wanted to explore the implications and possibilities of the absence of colour - using black and white - in my first quilt in this series.

I had been thinking recently about the relationship between patchwork pieces and cells, the first making up a quilt, and the second being the building blocks of all living organisms.  It occurred to me that the seams between the patchwork pieces are like the cell walls which surround each cell - each piece or cell is then separate, yet connected to, other units around it to create a tissue.

Using traditional 'tumbling blocks',  I've tried to examine this idea in an abstract way, using the contrast of black and white to highlight the individual units.  The little black diamonds represent cell nuclei.

Building Blocks

I have probably said this before in connection with the quilts I've made with Four in Art, but I really admire art which is equally satisfying whether it can be 'read' or not.  Cells, or blocks?  - what I really wanted here is that if you had the opportunity to view (say) onion cells down a microscope during your school days you might look at this quilt in a particular way, but that if not, then the pattern would stand by itself.

Please do visit the other Four in Art members.  We have a group blog, and you can also view each member's work at the links below.   As usual each quilt is such a different response to the theme!

Betty  on flickr

Camilla at Faffling

Elizabeth at OP Quilt

Janine at Rainbow Hare

Nancy at Patchwork Breeze

Simone at Quiltalicious

Susan at Patchwork and Play