Colours of Widnes picture completed for my friend Jackie.

This is the finished picture of "Colours of Widnes".......black, all shades of grey, brassy gold........really miserable looking, depicting an abstract image of Widnes, Lancashire, England in the first half of the 20th century.  The main image is an old postcard showing the tall chimneys of the factories belching smoke all over everything and the words "Widnes with the lid off makes the sun hide his face" written across the bottom.  The Runcorn-Widnes transporter bridge is at the top because Jackie's grandfather worked on it. The photos don't show it but the wires supporting the bridge have been embroidered in a very fine Kreinik metallic thread which has a twist of steel blue and black.  Because Jackie is a cat lover, I have included a little gold cat charm, sitting on the railway track at Widnes Station as a steam freight train pulls in on the other line. 

The picture will be framed in a  dull grey frame which at the moment is metallic gold but a few coats of dull, miserable looking, sooty, rainy-day coloured paint will do the trick!!

Abstract Crazy Quilted picture depicting the "Colours of Widnes" in Lancashire, UK

Top half of the picture showing the Runcorn-Widnes Transporter Bridge. A few simple birds fill the void at the top while I tried to keep most of the stitching looking industrial rather than flowery.

Bottom half of the picture which apart from the notice (the original being a brass plaque on Widnes Station) is mostly industrial with cog-wheels and brass metal discs, representing the factories of Widnes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sitting on the railway track watching the trains is tiny gold cat because Jackie is a cat lover from way back. Now I just have to keep it a secret until Jackie's birthday..........that will be the hardest part for me!!

A new CQ challenge........Colours of Widnes

A friend of mine saw my "Colours of Sardinia" picture before I gave it to Ennio and Anna. She loved all the bright, clear colours of the Mediteranean island and commented "I wonder what the colours of Widnes would be - just a dirty grey town?"  This friend is originally from Widnes which was an industrial town in Lancashire, England, with lots of chimneys belching out black smoke and soot all over everything and everyone.  While it is not quite like that today, it certainly doesn't boast the lovely bright colours of Sardinia!!  Well, that comment was like red rag to a bull, lol, and I love a challenge!! So I set to work collecting images of industrial Widnes and matching the images with black and grey fabric pieces. As a contrast to all this black and grey, I found a photo in a magazine of a brass plaque which says:

On Widnes Station

In 1965

Paul Simon 

Wrote the Song

Homeward Bound

So the only other colours on this picture will be dull gold albeit brass.  I have ordered some brass cog-wheels from someone on Ebay so it will be a bit "Steampunk" as well.  Here is my blank canvas.....

This will be a surprise combined birthday and Christmas present for a girl who has everything.  I think she will like it as it was her own tongue-in-cheek comment that started me thinking.  The photos shows the Runcorn-Widnes Transporter Bridge which my friend's grandfather worked on, an old postcard of the smokey chimneys of Widnes which says across the bottom "Widnes with the lid off makes the sun hide his face!" and lastly, a steam freight train pulling into Widnes Station.   Even the two floral pieces of fabric are grey so I think I will have a lot of fun with this one.  Stay tuned........

 

Colori di Sardegna or Colours of Sardinia

After nearly six years I have finished another UFO!!!!  Jumping for joy as I never thought I would ever see the end of this one.  Six years ago some very good friends of ours who were originally from Sardinia in the Mediterranean and which is part of Italy, were building a new house.  I promised  I would make them a house-warming present and decided to create a crazy quilted picture entitled "Colori di Sardegna" or in English, "Colours of Sardinia".   I set about collecting lots of photos from the net and from travel brochures to see just what Sardinia actually looked like - lots of bright, clear blues and turquoises in the sky and ocean, buildings in cream and pastels with terracotta tiles, flowers of pinks and reds..........easy!!  Wrong.

Here it is, in it's frame although not yet fixed in the frame. Two views, one of the embroidery and one with the frame around the edge.  I guess one of the positive things about spending a lot of time sitting at home with a husband who is having chemo for cancer and who often doesn't feel crash hot, is that I am getting a lot of UFOs completed.  This one in particular has been my problem child from ages so it is soooooo good to be seeing the back of it.  I just hope our Sardinian friends, Ennio and Anna, like it.

I tried to cover most aspects of the island from jewel coloured bays and beaches, sparkling white sand, a school of Sardines, Orange coral, rocky areas where tiny lizards bask in the sun, vivid blue Dragonflies (the wings are wired so they are 3D), grape growing areas, Poppies in the fields and ancient stone Nuraghi  which are represented by the circles in the bottom right corner. It is not meant to be an actual picture but just to represent the colours...... The buildings and church were sewn ad-hoc so they are crooked and a bit crazy as they tumble down the hill but that is part of the look that I wanted to achieve. I hope it has worked because there is no way that I am going to change anything at this stage, it has taken too long.

This is my original pieced background - as you can see, a lot changed from this point onwards.  I got rid of the heavy brown bits on the left.  The bottom brown pieces were meant to represent rocks and frankly I have absolutely no idea now what the top pieces were supposed to be - not a clue!!  The houses in the village got removed and replaced by more realistic looking buildings while the church..........that church gave me so many problems and in the end I gave up.  I got half way through it and lost the plot.  So it stayed rolled up in my cupboard for a further four years and every time I looked at it, I shuddered because I'd done too much to throw it away but yet I couldn't see where to go next. I think it was the church that threw me. I used a scrap of material that was used to make a Bishop's cope and the creator gave me a tiny smidgeon as it was very, very, very expensive and the gold threads are actual 22ct gold threads. I wanted to show the opulence of the insides of the churches but it didn't work.  The outsides are what you see and they are plain, cream walls and terracotta tiles.....I was trying to show the inside-out and it stopped me in my tracks for all that time. 

GROW YOUR BLOG

  Today is the day of the Grow Your Blog party organised by Vicki of "2 Bags Full".  I have never joined a blog party before so it will be interesting to see what happens.  My own blog is all about my love of crazy quilts and the methods of embellishing them.  I love to blog about my swaps with other crazy quilters too because we can all learn from one another.  My big "life-time" project is to make a cream on cream crazy quilt and blog about each block as it gets completed.  Altogether my quilt needs 96 blocks (12 long x 8 across) and each one is constructed from fabric that are various shades of cream from almost-white-ivory to deep "choc-milk" colour and all the embellishments and embroidery are also in different shades of cream with the addition of pearls and tiny bits of metallic gold.  In the beginning, I just added gold metal charms but these are all going to be removed and replaced by gold thread embroidery which won't tarnish.......can you imagine the mess of trying to clean tarnished metal charms on cream fabric??? It will be worth my time and effort to fix this problem before I do anymore blocks.  So basically this blog is about all aspects of crazy quilting and the associated crafts of embroidery, silk ribbon embroidery, lacework, tatting, crochet and beading.

2012 and 2013 Christmas cracker swaps

These are the most recent swaps that I have participated in - Christmas cracker swaps with Southern Cross Crazies.  I really enjoyed making these as some of the favourite colour choices can be a real challenge.  It's great fun waiting to see the crackers which come back in return as well.

Here are the 2012 cracker outers.  Unfortunately I cannot find the image for the third but the colour choices were:
Faye - Autumn
Maureen and Natascha - both Victorian Pastels.

And here are the 2013 ones which were only posted off on December 1st 2013.  The favourite colour choices were:
Arlene - Yellows, Blues and Creams (because of the Mulberry colour in the woman's coat and feathered hat, I added that colour as well.
Jenifer - All shades of blue.
Glenda - Greens, Pinks, Mauves, Aqua colours.

 

Message in a Bottle Challenge

The last entry for 2013 was my entry for the "Message in a Bottle" Challenge organised by Thearica Burroughs.  It was shortly after this that DH and I went to England for three months to visit his 91 year old mother and also friends and extended family.  Unfortunately while we were there, DH developed terrible pains which the doctors in UK couldn't control and which turned out to be the spread of his bone cancer into his spine, ribs, hips, left leg and breast bone.

As soon as I got home and went to start blogging again, I couldn't.  I couldn't get into my blog to update or to post new entries.  I can get in to look at it and read it but that is all. So after all this time, I have decided to start again with a brand new blog and move on.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Message in a Bottle crazy quilting challenge 2013

At last I have finished my entry for the Message in a Bottle Challenge organised by Thearica Burrows from Crazy Quilting Supplies. I wanted to make something that would appeal to adults as well as to children and consulted my seven year old grandson Jesse who is learning about ecology in school for advice. The end result is a concertina style book which slides into a presentation box for safe keeping.

Here is the story in Pages.....there is a thin gold dotted line sewn across all the pages that tracks the journey that the bottle undertakes from being thrown into the sea to when it is washed up on the beach.

Page One

The bottle was thrown from a sailing ship by a sailor who was afraid of the approaching storm and the rocks below the sea. I stitched the sailing ship masts and hull first before attaching each white felt sail with tiny blanket stitches and finished off with the rigging. I thought that the two birds were not "flying" birds because they had no wings, so they are seagulls floating on the waves.

Page Two

Before it reaches the surface, the bottle is taken over the top of a brightly coloured coral reef.

Page Three

As it travels the world for one hundred years, the bottle is caught up in swirling currents. I found this block challenging because part of the kit was a piece of turquoise net on which was stitched these three ribbon roundels. I unpicked the roundels from the netting and re-stitched them back again onto the circular swirling current. The kit also included a ball of beige coloured Perle cotton which I used to make the length of tatting on the sandy sea-bed.

Page Four

The bottle is eventually picked up by the waves and carried by a huge surf towards the shore. In the block, I included the netting that was the background of the roundels and also included some of the sequins which were also attached to the netting. I enjoyed creating the waves out of lots of pieces of white lace, some of which were included in the kit and hopefully I have captured the movement of the surf.

Page Five

At last the bottle is thrown up onto a beach.........a beach polluted with dead sea creatures such as the turtle trapped in rope, the duck with a rubber band around its neck, dead fish caught in a piece of wayward net, more bottles, a rubber sandal, a tin can, beaded oil slick, plastic and now, our bottle.  The message spills out, a simple S.O.S., no longer for the sailor whom we assume sailed home safely but for our own Planet Earth. 

Eventually, people arrived who understood the problems facing our environment. They cleaned up the ocean and the beaches and educated  the general public to respect our world - the water as well as the land.

Page Six

The last picture shows the results of this campaign to clean up our environment. There is a pristine clean beach with butterflies fluttering over fresh sea grasses, there are dolphins playing in the sea and clean water lapping on the shoreline, all under a bright, warm sun. Two surfers have propped their surfboards in the sand while they take a break and their boards reflect the message. The most time consuming part of this block was the surfboards as both are cross-stitched onto 27 threads-per-inch canvas. 

I can only hope that I have helped to spread the message.......let's keep our world clean from pollution!!

Posted by Viv and Eddie at 3:47 PM 27 comments

Dollshouse Miniature Crazy Quilt in 1/12th scale

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Dolls House Size Crazy quilt

Today I finally finished the 1:12 scale crazy quilt that I have been working on for the last two or three weeks. The whole quilt measure 8 1/4 inches x 7 inches or 21cm x 17.5cm and there must be at least two hundred tiny patches, I haven't counted them all. Each one is embroidered around all sides just like in a real crazy quilt and the tiny black edging finishes it all off. The edging was one that I bought in England when we were there two years ago but it was sky blue, so taking up my husband's suggestion, I dyed it black and then slip-stitched it around the edges of the lined quilt once it was dry. I am posting this to both my crazy quilting blog and my doll's house miniature blog because it fits them both. The straight edge is the top while the curved bottom edge is designed to go down the end and sides of a four-poster bed.

I used the stitch and flip method of piecing the tiny patches by hand, using a 3 mm or 1/8 inch seam and tiny running stitches.

This is a close-up of the bottom right hand corner showing some of the decorative motifs such as a butterfly, Rose spray and fan.