Dogs and quilts

Two unrelated items, dogs and quilts but this daily blogging is time consuming and this is easier! I'll choose quality over quantity any time so I'm already feeling that maybe this daily drawing business is doomed to failure! Again on the 'blotting paper' sketchbook, this drawing has everything I don't like, namely dark backgrounds and indistinct detail. I don't know what it is about backgrounds, although I do like very dark ones like this, but it's hard to make that work with pencil. I also think too much background information takes away from a drawing or a painting and looks more like a photo or a chocolate box illustration. A drawing should, I think, always look like a drawing.



I wanted to draw a dog this week because for the last couple of weeks or so, The Dog Whisperer is a programme I simply cannot miss! The problem is always the dog owner and not the dog and the analysis is very interesting - it illustrates how unnatural and irrational we human beings are especially when we see what we want to see, not what is in front of us. It's fun to see every dog owner falling into the same traps (dogs are not children!) and seeing the dog transform! It's a great lesson in common sense - which, as the saying goes, is not so common these days!




















Annabel asked to see the quilt from yesterday's drawing - well, ask and ye shall receive! This is the one on the stairs. The yellow fabric was ironed onto... crumbs I've forgotten the name! Is it Wonderweb? The design was then cut out to leave a positive and negative shape and they were then ironed on to another fabric - so one becomes the foreground and the other the background.




















A close up showing the yellow fabric on top. The edges were free-motioned three times




















The purple and yellow hangs in my study. I didn't have enough of the mottled purple fabric to make a border but it has touches of the same colour in it and pulls it all together - I hope!




















Close up showing the yellow fabric as background. The stitching has to go on the top fabric so with this one it goes on the outside of the leaf shape.

As I said, this was a pattern from Dijanne Cevaal's book Tifaifai Renaissance, one of my favourite quilting books and certainly my favourite method. Once you've done one, you see the possibilities for creating your own designs are endless.




















A gratuitous shot of another quilt which is one of my faves - just so you can see I do actually like to use colour! I had the most fun with this one and I wished it was a lot bigger so I could have played more with the stitching and beading! I used to hate people looking at my quilts and saying 'those are not your colours' because I love to experiment with all colours. I think it's a way of putting you in a box and trying to keep you there. I love autumnal colours too and spent a lot of time with them (and those were supposed to be 'my' colours) but I don't see why we should limit ourselves to any colour scheme if we don't want to. I did try out some very luminous almost florescent colours on one quilt and realised that some colours can actually give me a headache, so I did find some limits!