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Tuesday 13 October 2015

Fire Block

I am still busy making my Seasons quilt and one of the blocks is about a bush-fire, which is always a scary threat here in Australia in the summer.

I used a red pre-felt base which looks a bit like  wool felt but it has only been very lightly felted, so it is quite light and thin. I added some bits of wool roving to make a little fire scene.


Using the embellisher machine, I needle felted all the wool to make a fabric. An embellisher or needle-felting machine looks just like a sewing machine except you do not use any thread. Mine has 5 barbed needles that felt the wool rovings. When I was finished I was disappointed the resulting fabric looked too harsh and clunky.


It didn't look anything like the background that I hoped. I looked at the reverse side though and that was much better and far more subtle.


That was much more like the look that I was going for.

I placed the felted fabric in the middle of my crazy block and added some silk fabrics around it.

Fire- Crazy base block
I added some trees in stem stitch and then decided to go for an Australian theme and added some Australian animals. Here is the block completed.



Looking at the block now I realise that I could add some branches to the trees. That's one of the things with crazy quilts; you can usually keep adding stitches.

Bye for now,
Linda

6 comments:

nestki said...

Absolutely fabulous! Thank you so much for describing your process; I really enjoy reading about how you design and build your art.

Linda Steele said...

Thanks Nestki, It's actually handy for me to write what I do down, so I can remember in the future.

jude's page said...

That looks fantastic, well done

Linda Steele said...

Thanks Judy, I am really starting to like my embellisher machine

Gina E. said...

Wow, you certainly have captured the bushfire atmosphere..

Linda Steele said...

Thanks Gina, I liked this small one so much that I did a bigger one. I hope to post a photo of it soon.