Mrs. Furry Gnome's Fibre Art

I'm sure you've all wondered what Mrs. F.G. does while I'm out hiking and taking photographs, so here's the story.  Today, have a look at her sewing studio and the current projects on her design wall and sewing desk.  These range from creative quilts to what I call fibre art.  Mrs. F.G. hasn't sewn a typical large quilt in some time now.

The fibre artist's motto hangs on the wall behind the sewing machine, where you can always see it in case you get distracted.

And this is the design wall today, six projects on the go, plus two small old quilts that live in the upper corners.  The design wall is 3 sheets of foam insulation, 2" thick and 2'x8', covered by a sheet of quilt batting.  With a few pins she can lay out her projects and visualize the finished project.

And here's where all that creative work gets done, the sewing studio, another new project being laid out on the desk.

And of course several stashes of fabric around the corners, in all the shades of colour you might need.

The big project, ongoing for 18 months now, is this intricate hexagon-based pattern, all done using English paper-piecing, in odd-shaped blocks that will all need to fit together perfectly at the end.  It will be about 4x6' and is entirely being done by hand.

When you put the blocks together, you get some incredible patterns.  There are 6 tiny pieces of fabric in the centre here, and 18 around the next ring.  The idea is that the points all have to meet perfectly.  To give you an idea of scale, this entire piece is about 10" wide by 8" high, with 35 pieces of fabric if you just count out to the pink ones.

It you look closely here at individual seams, you can make out the tiny stitches; there are about 20 stitches per inch joining all these pieces.  The loose threads on top will be removed as a later step.

English paper-piecing is done by cutting out stiff paper for each shape, and folding the fabric over these to then stitch the pieces together by hand.  This is the back view.  It helps you be more accurate in getting each shape exactly the same.

This is the front view.  All those little loose threads holding the paper to the fabric (called 'basting') will be removed, as is the paper.  And of course eventually it will have a layer of batting and a back sheet put on to be quilted.  This is just step one, piecing the design together.  I'm estimating next year at this time for the finished product!

This is an embroidery sampler that Mrs. F.G. worked on until recently.  Many of the projects she does now are chosen in order to learn a particular technique, this one to learn a whole bunch of different hand embroidery stitches.

 A Bumblebee

 and a flower.

This one was an exercise that the artist did on her own, practicing 'layering', and curved piecing, where the fabric is not all cut on straight lines.  It also illustrates how the quilting itself (the wavy lines across the 'sky') can be a strong part of the pattern.  About 20" square.

 And this exercise was done at a workshop, where you started with a centrepiece, and then tried to cut fabric in crazy shapes to highlight it, about 16" square.

Five fibre art dolls made three years ago guard the sewing studio, and serve as inspiration for more creative work!  Hope you enjoyed the complete break from my usual blog topics.  I'll share some more projects from the artist in the future.  Mrs. Furry Gnome thanks you for your interest!