Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Hosting a trade on FAT

Hi everyone! This is a little 5"x7" art quilt that I have made for the trade I am hosting on Fibre Art Traders. I am very nervous about this upcoming swap. It's the first time I've ever done anything like this, and I'm suffering all kinds of worry. I mean, what if no one wants to do the swap? What if I'm a really bad hostess? Any way I have had fun thinking up the idea and making the item.
Here are the instructions for this mini quilt I've made. It's a little fiddly, but I really like the effect.
I got some freezer paper and did a plan of the pattern, the window frame in the middle and the stone wall round the outside. This on the flat side of the paper. Then got my craft knife and carefully cut out all the stones. You have to be careful and work slowly as sometimes the paper will rip.
In the photo above I ironed the yellow square of fabric onto the centre of the fabric and then I ironed the freezer paper onto my piece of fabric. Then I used Xpandaprint and painted it over the cut out holes quite thickly. Then I peeled off the freezer paper carefully while the Xpandaprint was still wet. On the left side of the mini quilt you can see I have started to sprinkle very fine sand over the Xpandaprint. I sifted the sand first to make sure it was fine.
In this pic I have used the heat gun to puff up all the Xpandaprint, and I am just touching up some of the "stones" with a little grey paint, you don't need to do this if you don't want to.
Now I filled inbetween the stones with cotton, I used a brown/black cotton about 5 strands thick. You could use ordinary tapestry cotton. I then added some batting and started to work on the window frame, which is made from store bought felt
I have added and stitched the whole window frame in place, and added the people inside.
Then I trimed it to size and stitched a climbing vine into place on the outside wall, adding leaves and flowers and finally a backing fabric.
Then I added a matching felt binding for it. I hope you like it, it was fun to make! I wonder where it will end up traveling to at the end of the trade?

Oh, and I must say thanks to Lisa for your nice comments. If you scroll to the March postings on the blog and look up a post called "Bits of this and that" you will find a photo of the complete header and an explanation of how it came to be. Oh and I checked your blog hoping to find a pic of a village and BINGO! there it was! It looks fantastic, you must be really pleased with it!

5 comments:

morningDove said...

oh boy, oh boy! I love your quilt. I can't wait to sign up and play. Thanks for your directions here too. Great fun. You will do great hostessing.

sherry carrigan said...

WOW Kiwi, this is great and so creative. I'll try to sign up for the trade, ut will depend on my schedule. Thanks for the tutorial.

Judith said...

Hi Carole, thanks for stopping by my blog. Lovely to meet you, I hadn't seen your blog before. Great to know you are just down the road from me, well a couple of hours!!!
Judith

Fannie said...

Very nice, Carole. You'll do just fine with the hostessing. Thanks for the tutorial.

NEEDLEWINGS said...

Hi Carole! Enjoyed visiting your blog! I have never used xpandaprint, but looks like fun. I have a trade from a gal in the UK with some on. Cool stuff! Your postcard is just divine! I was a little lost in the beginning since I saw your background fabric first, but then think that you used the cut out stones as a stencil, right? Just have to say your work it awesome and hope it comes to Ohio for closer viewing. lol Wanda