Mosaic Circles

Amy over at Amy’s Creative Side is working her wonders again. She is now hosting the 4th Blogger’s Quilt Festival, and as of today you can go to her site and enjoy links to all the wonderful works presented at the different blogs.

This time I thought I would show you my latest creation, along with some of the history that led up to this quilt.

I have been writing up a few posts from Murmansk, Russia, lately. When we visited there the first time in 2007, I was intrigued by a mosaic covered sculpture standing outside one of the cafes we visited.

I loved the look of it, and took quite a few photos. Sadly, I do not know the name of the artist.

After we got home my youngest sister wanted a memory quilt from our tour for her birthday. I then grabbed a detail photo of this sculpture and filled lots of the “tiles” with photos from our trip, before I printed everything on fabric and quilted it.

There are more photos of this quilt on my website.

While I was working on this quilt, I decided that one day I would like to make my own “tiled” quilt, – with “real” fabrics.

My chance came this summer after I had finished the last of my commissions, and I set about playing with ideas and designs. I deliberately avoided to look up my old photos, as I did not want to make a “copy” of the mosaic.

What I had in mind, was to explore interlocking, or overlapping circles, and, – with another piece of art in mind, that I saw last year, – how to achieve a sort of transparency at the same time.

I wrote about the installation above last year, in this post.

My own experimental piece ended up looking like this:

It is quite small, only 19 x 19 inches including the borders.

My starting point was to have one circle of each primary colour overlap each other, but then I threw in a pink circle in one of the corners, and liked the effect.

Most of the surface consists of two or more circles overlapping, so I had to find lots of in-between colours.

Since I love rummaging through my stash looking for just the “right”  shade of fabric, I really got to enjoy myself while working on this one.

I got side tracked a few times, so worked on the quilt on and off until recently. There were som trials and errors as I worked things out along the way, but everything came together in the end.  I dreaded most sewing all those small fabric pieces, but in the end, it went quite smoothly.

I took notes as I worked since I anticipated that I will be doing this again, with another design. I have since collected my write-ups and drawings in two pdf-files, which are available as a download pattern from my website.

Have fun browsing through all the eye-candy at the Blogger’s Quilt Festival.

Eldrid

Herring season

My husband and I had a few errands in the nearest town the other day. Nothing interesting like fabric shopping, I am afraid, – just boring, but necessary, stuff such as dentist appointments and spare parts for our snow blower.

The last item on our list, – some metal wire for our garage door, – could be found in the marine equipment shop, and this took us to the most hectic area of town at the moment.

The herring season is peaking just now, and since this town is really big in herring, there were a lot of boats lying at almost every available quay side.  While my husband was inside getting the wire, I sat in the car and watched some of the activity.

Some boats were taking on board equipment, some were delivering their catch, and some were washing and cleaning their boats.

On the boat right in front of me, it looked like they had just finished cleaning the boat itself…

… and then the men took turns hosing each other down.

The water spray glittered in the late afternoon sun.

It looked like they were having fun….

…. but even though the sun was shining, the temperature was below freezing, and there was also a cold wind blowing, so I think it must have been a really cold experience.

I guess it was necessary, though. Everyone who have handled herrings know how the small scales stick to just about everything, and are almost impossible to get rid of.

There were a lot of snow and ice on the quay beforehand, and with all the additional water, I should think it must have been like a skating arena there after the frost set in during the night.

I really liked the colours in the picture above. To better see what they are, I reduced the dpi as low as it would go in my photo editor, and then made a screen shot.

I then played some more, using the eyedropper tool to pick up a few of the colours and then “splashing” them randomly onto a clean background.

Of course, this is by no means a finished design, – far from it, – but it is a collection of colours I will definitely go back and have a look at when planning projects in the future.

But first, I must be a good girl and finish my ongoing projects.

Eldrid

Edited:

The photo below is a screen shot of the map mentioned in the comment below. It was made on the same afternoon.

As you can see, there are quite a lot of fishing vessels in the area just now.

Eldrid

Audition

This afternoon I have been auditioning threads to go along with the silk fabrics I have chosen for a new project. After lining up the possible contestants, I thought my work table looked so pretty, so I just had to take a photo:

A few minutes after I had put away my camera, the low autumn sun shone in through the window, and the silk fabrics and threads on the table were positively glowing. I just had to take one more photo (or ten):

This is for two commissioned items, which cannot be revealed in full till early next summer, – but I hope I will be able to  show you some teasers along the way.

Eldrid