My first time to the festival of Quilts.

I have my tickets and will be making a very early start on Thursday heading for the festival of quilts for the first time. We have to set off at 6am in order to get there for the doors opening. We just hope the traffic isn't bad or it will take even longer than that. It will be my first visit and I just hope it turns out to be as good as everyone tells me.

Coincidentally, I have been working on four art quilts recently all involving my photography and printing onto silk and cotton. The first one I finished started as a photograph of a piece of driftwood on a local beach. We were with our camera club on their summer photo shoot location which was - this summer - to Saltburn by the sea. It wasn't a very nice evening and everyone found it quite challenging. I, as usual, was also looking for shots which would transpose into textile work. This piece of driftwood was just one of those shots.

I turned the shot vertical and then began to play around with it using the filters in Photoshop. I came up with a very bold and colourful psychedelic effect which I quite liked.

I decided to print this onto cotton mainly to see how pigment inks printed directly onto untreated fine cotton. There was no bleeding - brilliant result. After the first print I put it through for a second time for a stronger colour, taking care to line it up exactly.

Next I painted parts of the image with metallic acrylic paints, mainly the blue and lime green to add to the surface texture.

I made up the quilt sandwich and free machined picking out the features of the image. I added more texture with hand stitching - seeding and French knots - and finished with a satin stitch edging.

It remains as a panel at the moment but I might use it for a book cover. No rush to decide.

The remaining three quilts are not quite finished yet but I'll show what I have done so far with one of them.

It began with a photo of some ivy wrapped around a very deep textured tree trunk.

Again I loaded it into Photoshop and created the invert image.

I continued to play with the filters and came up with this-

I decided to go with this one. I printed it onto treated habutai silk. I matched the threads using polyester, rayon and metallic and quilted the design. Here is a close up of the surface.

I am now in the process of adding surface texture and came up with another idea tonight so it will take a bit longer to finish. Watch this space for the finished quilt.

When on a visit to a university botanical garden I took this photo of an Echinacea.

And again, I loaded it into Photoshop and created this design.

This was also printed onto treated silk and quilted. I have just finished the hand stitching and it is ready to be edged. Here is a close up of part of it. I'll post the full quilt when it is finished.

The fourth quilt will have to wait for the next post as it is getting late and I still have things to do. I want to print out the floor plan of the quilt show and the list of exhibitors and traders. I shall also have to call on the CTDG stand where there is some of my work displayed and say hello to some fellow members. I didn't know until last week that I was going at all and didn't know until today which day I was going so I couldn't volunteer to steward for them. Apologies for that.

So until the next blog - cheers everyone.