New Piece and Paper Play

Well, now that the holidays are over, the nest is empty again. I still have books available for sale, Scroll past this post to the list, or click the link here.

Before Christmas, I was shopping with a friend at Michaels and found something new to play with. While looking at the scrapbooking papers, I ran across a handmade paper making frame and instructions. I have always been drawn to papers with fibers and other stuff in them, but never really thought about making my own. Now I have something more try.

I never thought papermaking would be so simple. Basically grind up paper in the blender with water, add fibers, glitter, and other stuff, pour into the mold, drain, press, and dry.  A package of dyed flowers were in the kit I got, that add neat fibers of bright colors. In the first photo, the right piece of paper includes the seeds removed from those flowers. The middle pieces show fibers from the flowers in them. the left piece includes pieces of some small swatches of fabric that were laying around.

The second photo shows the first piece I made on the right. I did not use quite enough pulp, and it is really thin in spots. I added chopped up blue tissue paper, metallic gold flakes, blue glitter, and some threads trimmed from some deep blue silk.
The pink piece is made from white cardstock and pink paper from a notepad, with pink dyed flowers.

  This is a close shot of one of the blue speckled papers. My first thought was to use some of this paper in my FFFC piece. I did cut out a snowflake from the thin piece, but I decided to use it elsewhere. I have been thinking of playing with paper and fabric collage, adding paper to quilts, or whatever.

When I molded the pink paper, I placed a piece of lace on the pulp before pressing the water out, and left it there until it was dry. It left a nice embossed look to the paper.

I finally got myself back to quilting in my studio. I am just about done with my FFFC piece that was due this past Saturday. The challenge this time was to make a quilt to represent either fire or ice. My first thought was ice- especially since when I think ice, I think blue; when I think fire, I think red, and red is not a favorite color of mine. I wanted to get the look of a window pane covered with frost, and snowflakes falling against a night sky.
The deep blue fabric is one I painted and sunprinted with tiny star confetti, and used salt on. It reminds me of snow at night. The fabric also has the shimmer of Super Sparkle added to the paint.

I cut snowflakes out of a shimmery organza backed with Wonder Under fusible. The frosty edges of the pane are made from 2 colors of a silver metallic enhanced fabric printed with leaves, one in icy blue, and one in white. They reminded me of ice formations when I bought them over a year ago. I cut out some of the leaves, and it left great, random, icy looking formations. I also used some of the cut leaves to add to the ice around the edge.
Opalescent shredded Mylar was melted and added for the more lacy inner ice formations.

The organza snowflakes were fused, tumbling down the center, and scraps from cutting the snowflakes, make smaller flakes. I used silver lined clear and blue seed beads to add even more sparkle to the flakes. I began adding some clear beads between the free motion quilting I did with metallic silver thread. I think I will be adding more beads over the rest of the quilt, to tame down the puffiness of the less quilted areas.

I may need to tame down the shine in Mylar in the upper right. It seems to take over the photo.

Here are 3 photos of my large upper garden, showing the Balsam tree, Wichita Juniper, and grasses. It was neat how different the sky was in each. They were taken at different times during one day.