Where does the time go? I fully intended to keep up this blog on a regular basis but somehow that hasn’t happened. I have been working on pieces that are either for competition or display which I can’t display here, so in my head I had nothing to show.

I started the year by playing with ideas which still loiter in my head for a project later in the year.

This year I have decided not to travel as I did last year but to concentrate on things learnt on my travels, and the above were as a result. I intend to go further and actually produce something from these experiments.

Then there was some snow dyeing….

It has been frustrating this year because I have had relatively little snow in the garden and it has not always been of the right consistency, this was the first run and I have recently done another. Having thought that I would do a lot of dyeing like this this year, I have been disappointed with the results, not enough thought has gone in to my efforts, it has been a mad dash to use the snow before it disappeared.

At the beginning of the year I started doing journal quilts again for the Quilter’s Guilds Contemporary group. This year they are 8 x 10″ in portrait format and they have to have some purple in them for the first four months. I decided to use my many photographs of India and at the moment have been using old sari scraps which I brought back from The Stitching Project last year.

Quite by chance I also bought some plain cottons while I was in Pushkar and lo and behold the colours I chose are the colours that I need for the JQs this year. I have appliquéd this from a photograph I took of a mural in the Delhi Craft Museum.

My February JQ was inspired by a photograph of a screen where there were colours behind it.

To create the JQ I have used some printed silk that I bought in Delhi and cut out squares which have silk scraps inserted behind them.

The JQ for March has taken this idea one step further, photo to follow in the next post.

I am a member of a small group in this area who meet for the day about 4 times a year and who set themes for the following session. This time it was the sound of (in French)  “ou”. I thought long and hard and then managed to get 5 or six in to the same piece. Having done the fine machine appliqué for the January JQ I was motivated to continue, and I used neo-colours and crayons to add the colour detail.

We have also had a reveal for Fifteen by Fifteen since my last posting, the subject was mono-printing which I found really difficult, I like to work from a subject rather than a technique, but finally I got my head round it. I used some fabric which had been dyed with pomegranates and then I printed from the imprint of bubble wrap using procion thickened with manutex. Using the pattern I had printed  and coloured flowers and then chain-stitched around them, adding a little sparkle wax at the end and printed some silvery grass at the bottom with a thermo-fax screen

I have also worked on a piece for Quilt Expo en Beaujolais where I will also have a stand and be teaching quick and easy workshops, based on creating images in stitch from photos.

During this period, a piece I did some years ago has come home after travelling around France in a suitcase collection; we had to create an advertisement around the word MacFlé. I was drawn back to the Scottish hills and had great fun doing this although the pleating of the kilt did take some considerable time!

An finally a little detail of another piece that I have just finished.

Now back to the stitching!

Quilt Expo en Beaujolais is 13th -16th April 2016 at Villefranche sur Soane.