Collage Mania Donations

These are the small quilts I have donated to Collage Mania where all proceeds go to the American Cancer Society. You can read about it at http://www.virginiaspiegel.com/CollageMania2009.html . I have been very fortunate in my life and really have not been touched by cancer until recently. Two weeks ago today the young mother of a 6 year old who was in my Granddaughters class died of breast cancer. Also a friend of mine got the news that her breast cancer had spread and the prognosis is not good. She has 3 teenage sons and a 21 year old. Please support this effort and you will have the opportunity to own some great art and help fight this awful disease.

The first quilt is painted Warm and Natural that is heavily thread painted. It's called 'Monet's Garden' and is 7" w x 8" h.






















The second quilt is called "Pear (par) n.". I painted the background fabric and then dry brushed on different paints and added more color by using different mesh bags as stencils. For the pear I used a stamp to get the outline of the image and then painted it to get the 3D effect. The pear is lightly stuffed for more 3D. The words are free motion stitched along with the rest of the quilt. This one is 9w x 7h.

More ATCs

Here is another set of ATCs I created for a swap organized by the Surface Design group on yahoo. I can't tell you how much I have enjoyed these swaps. What a great way to share your art and get some great little pieces in return.

I love puffy paint and have used it in many of my pieces to make rocks, trees, devil horns and several other things. In this first picture the original fabric is on the right. I then covered it with swirl designs by using puffy paint straight from the bottle. You need to let the paint dry completely before puffing so I let it set about 48 hours. I used a heat gun to puff the paint. You can tell puffing is done when the paint looses its glossy look. I rubbed lime green paint over the rough surface and after it dried I brushed it with Lumiere Super Sparkle. Finally I quilted the entire piece with a dark purple thread. One of the great things about puffy paint is that you can paint over it an stitch through it.



Here are the finished ATCs. Also shown is my ATC finder........ a little frame I created out of timtex to lay over the uncut fabric to see how a certain spot will look when cut to ATC size.

Judges Choice Award

I was pleasantly surprised to receive a Judges Choice award at the Indiana Heritage Quilt Show for my quilt Envy. Here is the link to the original post about this work when I completed it in December. Fiber Fabrications: New Work - Envy - A Little Scary?

Atc For Textile Traveler

Today I made this ATC for Textile Traveler. She has some great gecko ATC's on her blog up for trade so have a look and see if any are still available. This is really different for me since it contains no fabric. I was looking though some old craft supplies and found a bottle of Weathered Wood (crackle medium) . First I painted brown paper from a grocery bag with linen colored acrylic paint. After it dried I painted on a thick layer of the crackle medium. When that dried I painted it with a burgundy acrylic. It is supposed to start to crackle as soon as you start painting but this stuff must be 12 years old and did not crackle much so I hit it with the heat gun and it came out really cool. I then used my finger to rub on a little gold paint for highlights.

The silver leaf is made from a Heresy Kiss wrapper that I carefully flattened and then ironed a fusible web to the back to make it stronger. I cut the leaf and ironed it to the crackled paper. I put this on top of a piece of timtex and added printed tissue paper to the back. I then added a little stitching. I hope she likes it.

Experimenting With the Heat Gun

Yesterday I decided to try a technique from the Fall 2003 issue of Quilting Arts Magazine. This article was about using your heat gun to melt holes into stitched felt to create texture. I started with a 8 1/2 x 11 piece of brown felt and then stamped it just to create a pattern to sew over.
I then put piece of green silk on the back and free motion stitched a simple grid pattern and filled in the stamped images. The article said that when I burned the felt away the silk would show through.
I got out the heat gun and started to burn away some of the felt. One of the first things I did was burn a hole through all layers.....whoops too much heat! I played around with using more or less heat on the piece and was disappointed that my green silk did not show up very well even when it did show through. Guess I should have picked a color with more contrast. This is what it looked like after the burning. Pretty ugly.....

This is the back.....at this point I like it better than the front.


Not giving up on the front, I got out my Shiva paint sticks. I lightly rubbed the surface with metallic blue, gold and charcoal and then the edges with gold. I also played with heating the edges a bit more to get a more distorted look. Here's the finished piece. It really has a nice 3d quality.

Experimenting With My Versa Tool

One of my favorite things to do in the morning while drinking my coffee is to browse through back issues of Quilting Arts Magazine. I keep them in a pile in my family room (this drives my husband crazy!) next to the comfy sofa. Last week I pulled out the Winter 2005 issue. It is amazing how after sitting around for a while the issues seem new again. The article that caught my eye was on using a soldering iron to create marks on cloth. My daughter gave me the Versa Creative Tool and a heat gun for my birthday last year so I thought I would give this a try.

Step one was to put down a square of polyester felt and then put 3 layers of polyester organza over it. It is important to use polyester since it will melt together from the heat. I used black felt with a layer of white, navy blue and royal blue organza in that order. You then used the soldering iron with a very fine tip to first seal the edges and then make marks through all layers. On my first attempt I used felt leftover from my GD's 50's skirt and a sheer polyester print which did not work at all. The layers did not melt together and it was a mess. I gave up on that one and went and had lunch.

Determined not to give up I did this second attempt. I must say that as I was doing this I really didn't like it and almost gave up several times. It was hard to get the hang of using the tool with just the right pressure. Too much would burn through all layers and make holes and not enough pressure left marks that were not deep enough. When I was finished it still looked rather boring so I got out the paint. I used 4 colors on Lumiere's and dry brushed them on the surface. I put a layer on shinny pink sequenced fabric covered with another layer of navy organza on the back to get the pink color to show through the holes and then did some free motion quilting with metallic threads and added a ton of beads. I wish they showed up better in the picture. Now that it is finished I actually like it and have a couple of ideas on how I could use this technique in a larger piece. This one measures 8 1/2 x 11

Thunder Snow

Yesterday we welcomed March with thunder snow. This is the phenomenon where you have thunder and lightening in a heavy snow storm. It is rare enough to get a good snow in the Atlanta area but this is even more uncommon. Saturday it was over 60 degrees so the ground was warm and not much of the snow stuck but it was still a beautiful site to see and it came down in huge heavy flakes for over 3 hours. It was strange this morning getting up and still seeing the deck covered with snow. I grew up in northern IN so I have seen plenty of snow in my lifetime and I really do prefer the GA weather to IN but it is nice to see this once in a while.