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!
