Friday, January 1, 2010



This was a birthday gift for my dad's wife Kimberley. They have recently acquired a new summer place in Mesa, Arizona. The entire place is decorated so beautifully after the reno. She just needed a little piece of something from home. Her love of Kokopelli sent me on a hunt for a cool design. I was inspired to draw this guy from a cool tattoo I saw online. The fabrics are batiks and hand dyes. Kokopelli is fused with waves of music and outlined and shaded in black. The wholecloth background is free motion machine quilted.
This is the third prairie landscape and everyone was marvelling about the truck. It really is just a simple photo transfer, but the effect is astonishing when it is directly on the background. It really looks like the entire piece is a photograph. My friend at work who purchased this piece took one look at this and said it was a photo of his back yard fields as a child with the truck and everything. There is a lot of fun threadplay on the golden landscape fabrics. The sun is some shimmery sheer silk with hand stitched sun rays. It turned out to be very delicate but bright. I placed the truck so the bright side is sun side and it worked out quite nicely.

This is my second prairie landscape. This sold to such a nice friend from Ontario. She saw it and just had to have it. What a sweetheart! It was so fun because I ventured into photo transfer and threadplay. The barn and hay bails are photo transfers with threadplay over top. I hand stitched all of the layers of landscape, but stitched over top with threadplay. The fabrics are batiks and hand dyes with a few frayed edge pieces tucked in for texture.

Hooray, all gifts are given and the reactions were priceless. Sometimes I think I could sew a sloppy silly thing and it would be well loved just because I made it. That's how wonderful my family is. I am finally in a position to post my last 3 private commissions. I had so much fun making them and they all sold very quickly so I am very pleased. This first one has fabrics ranging from linen, silk and polyester to cottons and batiks. I used a very loosely woven cotton and pulled out layers of thread to create a grassy effect. I top stitched the fabrics in place with a blind applique stitch and then quilted it using x's, random stars and stitches as well as couching to hold the smaller grassy edge in place. The sun is a wooden button with sunrays in a chain stitch.