Digital Collage…..from rusty wheel rim

By on 9-29-2009 in Original Quilts

rusty wheel

This is my first digital collage. I started with the image below….a rusty wheel rim. The bright red and orange colours captured my imagination. There is a blade of grass in the center of the rim which gave some colour contrast. I manipulated pieces of the image, cropped them in Adobe Photoshop and moved them onto a new background. The colours for the background were taken from the rim as well. The lines were made with a Photoshop brush and applied before moving the image. This collage would look good on a card, in a scrapbook page or as a block in an autumn quilt.

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A Wedding Quilt…….”Turn Around”……for my young niece

By on 9-29-2009 in Original Quilts

“Turn around and you’re a young wife with a babe of your own”. {lyrics by Malvena Reynolds, 1900-1978}……When the design of this quilt became a reality on paper, the name was clear. On the back label I placed two photos, one of my niece in her wedding gown and another of her when she was about 3. How do our children grow so big so fast? A year after the event, she is carrying her first child. The lyrics have pulled at my heart as my children grew to adulthood and my grand girls are now doing the same. Time never ceases.
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Each block of the quilt has a meaning and a message along with it. Inside the label pocket on the back are two pages. One with the lyrics of the song and another with a block map and the messages that go with each of the blocks. I also had extra photos so created the two little hanging pillows using the left over patchwork pieces from the quilt.

Fabric Postcards, the greatest addiction ever

By on 9-29-2009 in Original Quilts

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I was first introduced to fabric postcards through Valerie Hearder’s Landscape Yahoo group. http://www.valeriehearder.com
These little mini quilts are so much fun to do and the possibilities are endless. Four were done for swaps and the other four were for family.

My first was the little church. I thought of our Gatineau Hills and the churches which are nestled among the trees in the Ottawa Autumn scenery. I felt there was more detail than needed in this card for such a small canvas. I learned to streamline as I went along. The second card is entitled “Flying Home in the Morning Mist”, a picture of the highway through Thunder Bay. It is the result of a monochrome challenge. I chose brown. The third is one of the bike paths approaching the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. I called it “Cycling Through an Ottawa Dawn”. The deer was the next for a Christmas swap. It is called “Christmas Morn’ at Silver Lake”. The deer are from photos of a pretty doe that visited our garden through the fall and early winter. The singing snowmen I named “Snowdust Singers” and sent to family at Christmas. Two valentines were made for my grandgirls. The latest I made for a spring swap and I chose Ontario Trilliums growing in a forest glade. This one is “Ontario Trilliums in Bloom, a Sure Sign of Spring.

Lighthouse, Prince Edward Island, Canada

By on 9-29-2009 in Original Quilts

Prince Edward Lighthouse

The lighthouse quilt was made for a black and white with one colour pop challange with the Valerie Hearder Landscape yahoo group. I could not find printed fabrics that I liked for this little quilt so I bought solid black and white and used my machine’s fancy stitches to pattern them. A tear away backing kept the stitches raised and then was removed for easy quilting. The gulls in the clouds were done with a scallop stitch. The whole quilt was machine quilted. This 17″ by 17″ quilt is the first black and white quilt I have made. I usually use a lot of colour as you can see in the Sunrise, Sunset quilt.

I designed this quilt from a photo of the Prince Edward Island lighthouse with a free piece of software called “Quilt Assistant”. Here is where you can find it:

http://www.cosman.nl/software_en.html

It is an awesome program and I plan to use it more often.