After watching
Laura Wasilowski and
Frieda Anderson on
Sewing with Nancy (
here)the other day, I was inspired to do a few small collages. In one of the segments, Laura made up a pattern sampler of nine small squares. I started out making patterns with strips and such,
But it was not long before my little squares started to be pictures instead of patterns, lol.
Here are all the little squares up on a felt board. I have a range of these felt boards, which are just a timber frame like for a stretched canvas, only I have lots of different sizes covered in felt for viewing work on before I make finishing decisions I call them preview boards. Sometimes, a black border can give you an idea of what a finished piece will look like. In any case, I tend to mount my work on stretched canvas when it is finished, so it works for me.
Above, the boards range in size from 8 to 24" square and lots of rectangles in between.
Anyhow, back to the work at hand.
I will just go through each block and show you what I did whilst I was playing.
This one was pretty similar to one of LH's in the video,only I cut some bias strips with my curvy rotary cutter blade and put them in the centre of each leaf. It looks pretty effective.
This was the next one and it started out as the purple rays on a green background, but I decided it was a bit boring, so I played around with splitting and layering the leaf shapes.
In this one I used bias strips to curve and make wavy lines. As I was doing it, I thought about how it might look if I put little knots in like in tree bark.
After I cut the bits for the leaf centres earlier, I had a little triangle left with curvy edges. I decided it looked like a sunflower petal, so I made some more, only this time I used the larger wave blade.
My next experiment was to use the curvy blades to make some water by layering different colours. Then I added some grass and reeds.
Next, I thought I would make a tree. A very bloody tree! At this stage I cut myself with the rotary cutter - as you do! I did not realise how much my finger was bleeding until I dripped it all over my tree! Yuk! OH well, a bit of paint or embellishment will fix it. And for easy identification 50 years from now, it has my DNA.
After a little break, I played with the wave blade and got these cute little leaves by lining up the blade so that the last cut met the first cut and did not stay an equal distance away (like in the leaf centres) It took a while to get it right, but I had fun with it.
Then, I remembered that I had a scallop template in my quilting templates and I thought - "I wonder if I can make big leaves the same way, and guess what - I did, aren't they cute?
Whilst I was cutting the big leaves, I noticed the patterns the strips of leaves made as I cut them and so I made that pattern, too. There are actually two patterns on this square.
While I was thinking about what to put in the last square, I happened to look at the scraps left from the tree's leaves and noticed how two of them together made a pine tree, so that became my last square for the sampler.
As you see, it doesn't take me long to get back to playing after a big day doing boring stuff.
Now on to lots of stitching and embellishment.
