10.4 Pixel Play

This week our Project Quilting Challenge was Pixel Play. We were to create a quilt using Pixels as our inspiration. For those who don’t know what a pixel is, here is a simple explanation I found online- 

The term “pixel” is actually short for “picture element”,  small little dots are what make up the images on computer displays, whether they are flat-screen (LCD) or tube (CRT) monitors. The screen is divided up into a matrix of thousands or even millions of pixels. Typically,you cannot see the individual pixels, because they are so small. This is a good thing, because most people prefer to look at smooth, clear images rather than blocky, "pixelated" ones. However, if you set your monitor to a low resolution, such as 640x480 and look closely at your screen, you will may be able to see the individual pixels. As you may have guessed, a resolution of 640x480 is comprised of a matrix of 640 by 480 pixels, or 307,200 in all. That's a lot of little dots.

Each pixel can only be one color at a time. However, since they are so small, pixels often blend together to form various shades and blends of colors. The number of colors each pixel can be is determined by the number of bits used to represent it. For example, 8-bit color allows for 2 to the 8th, or 256 colors to be displayed. At this color depth, you may be able to see "graininess," or spotted colors when one color blends to another. However, at 16, 24, and 32-bit color depths, the color blending is smooth and, unless you have some kind of extra-sensory vision capability, you should not see any graininess.

I downloaded a couple of apps one that would take a photo and make a pixel pattern & one you could draw your own pixel pattern on . I also found a site where you could upload a photo and it would create a cross stitch pattern from your photo, it gave you exactly how many stitches there were & the colors you would need. When they announced Pixel Play as the theme, I was really excited because sewing with only squares is so easy, but when I started taking photos & uploading them to create pixel patterns I realized that it would take a lot of squares to make a quilt, some of the patterns I created had more than 3000!

I was pretty positive I needed to figure out something with about 2900 less squares. 

This was a photo I took of a small white butter plate with a round white rock in it. 

When I was looking for ideas to pixilate my quilt this week, I came across another interesting article & definition- 

Pixilation, spelled with a second i, is a filmmaking technique that dates to the beginnings of cinema, in which live actors are posed frame by frame and photographed to create stop-motion animation. An archaic British word meaning "possession by spirits (pixies)", the term has been used to describe the animation process since the early 1950s. 

Of course the word Pixie caught my eye and I thought about little pixie houses made of mushrooms, I decided I wanted to create a little Pixel Play- Pixie Play House! LOL

I found some fun mushroom photos & 
some vintage mushroom houses, after pixelating them I realized I needed to scale things down, I didn't have time this week to sew 500 squares together & if I wanted to complete the challenge it would going to have to be a whole lot smaller! 

I drew out a graph & a sort of mushroom shape then started digging through fabric for ideas. I came across one of my favorite pieces of batik that is a checkerboard design and I got the brilliant idea to incorporate “pixel” looking fabrics, I was surprised I had as many fabrics as I did with little squares in them. I used the green to give the background that dappled shadow look of leaves in the sun. I didn’t have much red & white fabric but I did find a batik that looked sort of mushroom cap red speckled. 

I made my squares 1 inch and then wished I had used bigger squares or fused them instead of sewing them. My seams were not very matching, but I was happy with the way it turned out. We had more snow this week & the bright colors make me long for spring & fishing in the warmth of the sun! I remembered I had some little fishing buttons so I added one little “gone fishing” sign, while I was digging in the button tin I also found a tiny little pixel shaped button I used for my door knob. 

I did a random quilting job, the finished quilt is only 8 x 10 so it didn't make sense to put it on my longarm machine. Doing smaller projects on my sewing machine is good practice, but I will admit I am spoiled by the longarm, it's so much easier to move the machine around & draw than it is to move fabric around.  I appliquéd a couple of leaves to the quilt just to add some depth and make it look like the tiny house it is supposed to be. Then I bound it with that crazy black & cream checkerboard fabric. 

It was a fun challenge & I'm really excited about the pixel apps I downloaded, someday when I’m feeling really ambitious I might have to attempt some bigger pixelated projects! 

The whole country had snow dumped on it again this past week, & I almost did a snow pixel picture, but thought maybe that would be cheating since basically it would be one big white square! LOL 

1. I found a fun little poem about Toadstool houses that I added to the back of my quilt- 
   

   (the picture of the quilt back was taken before I inked it in, but I wanted to show the fun batik)
   

   
   

   

   
   

Challenge 10.3 Bigger Than A Breadbox

The challenge this week for Project Quilting is "Bigger Than A Breadbox"...what?? LOL
I had a moment of panic when I thought this meant we would have to create a full sized quilt. There was no way I could accomplish that in one weeks time. Then they gave us a minimum size we could use & said it had to be bigger than that. So it had to be larger than 8 x 16 which is apparently the average size of a breadbox. My finished project ended up being 9 x 24 x 3.

When we started Project Quilting this season, my original plan was to create a little book using all the quilts I make for the 6 challenges. When they gave us the size rules, I decided I would use this challenge to create the cover for my "quilt book". On Sunday I started doing research about the saying "Bigger Than a Breadbox", I thought maybe this would give me some creative ideas, because we never had a breadbox, we had a bread drawer! LOL

I found a book titled "Bigger Than a Breadbox" about a young girl who has a magic breadbox that apparently grants wishes that are no bigger than a breadbox. I didn't have time to read a book this week for inspiration, but I did like the idea of something magical.

I also found a band called "Bigger Than A Breadbox" and went online to listen to some of their songs...they were "interesting" to say the least. One song that cracked me up was called Dark, it had lyrics that were pretty "dark" with verses about dark things....black is the color of my true loves soul...dark like my coffee...the reason I wear black is to soak up the light...the song was chanted to the tune of a creepy, old organ in a scary movie. I have a DARK sense of humor so I found it funny, you can listen to it and other gems by "Bigger Than a Breadbox" on YouTube. I liked the idea of something dark, mysterious & a little creepy.

As you know my brain tends to wander, so with a couple of thoughts in my head, I decided that the forest surrounding my quilt shop fit the idea of something a little magical, dark, mysterious & creepy. I had a plan, I would create a book cover that represented the woods next door.

The house where I quilt is Ron's parents old home, it was built the year he was born & sits on the site where another family homesteaded in the early 1900's. There is a little forest of old trees all around the house & down through the draw that separates their house from ours. Some of the big old cottonwood trees & willow trees were probably here before any people lived here, but most of the trees & bushes were planted by the first homesteaders & later the Linn family. Over the years it has become one big tangled bramble of old trees, new trees, dead trees, bushes, tall grass & owls.

There is a family of big horned owls who watch our every move. They have lived in the forest for as long as I have lived here. We love to listen to them in the evening & every once in awhile we will catch them sitting out in the open, or see them silently swoop from tree to tree. Someday I hope to capture them on camera, but they are pretty elusive! They & the other forest birds & creatures give you the sense that something is always watching you in the woods.

When our kids were little they spent hours playing in the woods & on the big sprawling willow trees we call the monkey trees. With the help of their cousins & friends from town they built elaborate little cabins, tree forts & rope swings in the deep dark woods. If I wanted kids out of my hair I knew I could tell them to go play in the trees & they would gladly head out the door. I knew they would end up at Grandma's house at some point where she had a magic cookie jar & real TV. I never worried about them being in any sort of danger, it was only 1/4 mile between grandmas house & ours, what kind of danger could lurk in an area the size of Winnie the Pooh's 100 acre wood? It wasn't until they were all grown up & had kids of their own that I suddenly realized how dangerous those woods could be.


The way is clear,
The light is good,
I have no fear,
Nor no one should
The woods are just trees,
The trees are just wood.
Not need to be afraid there-

There's something in the glade there.....
 (Into the woods lyrics-Stephen Sondheim)

It's funny how as a parent you just say...GO...but with grand kids you change your tune & say NO...it's too dangerous! Rattlesnakes, Spiders & Ticks Oh My!

These beautiful tangled old woods have a way of drawing you in,  I love listening to the wind in the trees while I am working in my garden or quilting in the summer with the windows open. It's fun to walk back through the brambles trying to catch a glimpse of the owls who live in the tall branches. The big old cedar trees are beautiful during the winter months when they are covered with snow. Walking in the woods in the winter reminds me of the verse from the poem 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' by Robert Frost...

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The woods are certainly "Bigger Than a Breadbox" :)  Somehow I wanted to capture their beauty, mystery & magic in my little quilt this week.

 On Monday I  dug through my stash and found the perfect fabric, a bundle of Marcia Derse fabrics I  bought last summer. *you can check out her fabric online...AMAZING designs! It has that magical element I wanted to convey in my design.

I have been cleaning my sewing room since January & last week I found some paper piece patterns for pine trees which I had printed a couple of years ago. I decided I would give them a try even though I don't like paper piecing.

A couple of friends & I got together during the polar vortex & did some foundation string quilting, I still had that in my head & thought it would be fun to incorporate some string quilting, I thought this would be a good way to represent the lines of the trees.

Instead of doing paper piecing, since I also wanted to incorporate the string quilting I decided to do foundation piecing. I traced the tree pattern onto a piece of fabric that would fit the guidelines & work as a cover for my quilt book. Then I decided I would make a darker side to my forest & a lighter side, separating the two with  bright yellow strips left over from the yellow challenge we did last season.

Doing foundation piecing was pretty confusing, but I really like the sharp look of the little trees so I am happy I attempted it. I know I will be using this tree pattern again down the road!

On Tuesday after I had the main idea all sewn down, I  just needed to quilt & bind it. I was pretty excited I had the whole thing almost done & it wasn't even Wednesday yet!
I had a box of crafty junk from my cleaning spree I took in on Tuesday afternoon for the art teacher at school, when we were talking about the new challenge for the week. she asked if I was making a box since it was a breadbox challenge....hmmmm....I really hadn't thought of that.

When I got home I looked through my craft supplies, did some measuring, and decided I still had the rest of the week & if I could make it work I would create a little box to attach to my quilt.

I didn't take the seam allowances into consideration so it isn't quite as large as I a planned to make it, but it works & I really like the way it turned out. I used a heavy stiff felt to make the box and then lined it with tag board. I then found what I thought was a magical looking piece of batik and quilted it to the felt, and also created a lining for the rest of the box cover. I didn't think the cover was stiff enough so I found a fusible interfacing and added that to the cover before I sewed the lining on. I then glued and sewed my box to the cover, I love this Fabric-Tac glue, it smells awful, but you can mend jeans with it if you are in a hurry & it doesn't wash out! I did a lot of hand sewing on this project, mainly because I needed to tack the box down to the lining fabric & hand stitching seemed to be the best way to do that, since I was stitching that down I figures I might as well hand sew the binding on too.

To finish the outside of my box I made a button out of a piece of red twig dogwood, and a little latch out of braided raffia. I really wanted a piece of wood from the actual forest next door, but the snow is now over the tops of my boots deep & trudging through it to find the perfect twig is not on my bucket list for the week!

On the inside of the box cover I painted a little owl & added the lyrics to the song "Winter Woods" by  Minnesota folk artist Peter Mayer. (if you ever get a chance to go hear him perform...do it!) 

I also added some little eyes to the circles on the darker fabric...gotta have that creepy element :) 

Even though the woods are a bit creepy, mysterious & dark...they are magical & oh so beautiful. This song says how I feel about them & is the feeling I wanted to create when I made my little box.

I fly sometimes
Through the frozen trees
In the winter woods
In their robes of white
Chanting silently
In the winter woods

Like a forest abbey choir
Whispering hymns of snow and ice
In Excelsis to the cold
And Hosanna to the sky
Hosanna

And holy trees
They know when I'm
In the winter woods
And they bid me to sing
And I comply
In the winter woods

But I stumble in my turn
Because I cannot find the words
In that church of birth and pine
The only word that comes to mind
Is "beautiful"

So quietly
I sing beautiful in the winter woods
And the trees agree
They all agree
In the winter woods
We all agree
In the winter woods

Amen
Amen

Red, White & Blue Challenge 10.2

The second Project Quilting Challenge is a color challenge. These type of challenges can be tough, I have a hard time seeing beyond the color. When they hinted earlier in that week that it was going to be a color challenge I already had a mental block. When they announced that the only colors we could use were red/white/blue, I had a mental shutdown.

After reading some of the posts by others in the challenge, I found I wasn't the only one who really wasn't a fan of the colors we were given. I think red/white & blue just shout patriotic, so I automatically started thinking about flags, the 4th of July, the Star Spangled Banner. But I really didn't want to make a patriotic quilt about the 4th of July :(

I thought maybe if I dug out some fabrics it would spark an idea, the rules specified
absolutely no other colors than the red/white/ blue, so I was a little worried I wouldn't have anything that would work. I found a layer cake of batiks that had some solids in it, along with some darker blues. I was pretty exited that I actually had a red fabric without any other colors in it!

I started tossing some ideas around, one was the image of a Norwegian flag flying over a fjord, but I really needed green to do scenes from Norway. I thought about Jul Tomte & Nisse in their little red hats & blue suits with long flowing white beards, but it would be easier to paint that image & I didn't want to paint anything. Bright red & white mittens on a blue background were another image that came to mind, but then it snowed again & mittens lost their appeal.

It's definitely January, the cold weather had a grip on my creativity & my mood....the weather & the color scheme! LOL

My mind tends to wander from one thought to another pretty randomly. That is probably why I start projects then never finish them. While I was thinking about flags, patriotism, the news, the government shut down,  the dreary cold weather, I started thinking about what it is that makes us feel so strongly about our countries, & the places we call home.

I live in western South Dakota on the Cheyenne River Reservation. I am not a Native American but am a mix of Norwegian, English, Swedish & German. I married a man whose grandparents came here in 1918 when the reservation was opened by the government to homesteaders. Although I have lived here for over 40 years and he was born & raised here, we are still technically outsiders. This land belonged to the Native Americans long before any Europeans even knew the land existed. Yet this is still HOME, it is where we live & make a living, where we raised our children, and where our roots have grown deep in the prairie soil.

My great-grandfather came to America from Norway when he was a young man and settled in northern Minnesota. This summer I had the opportunity to travel to Norway with a group of my cousins & aunts, to meet our Norwegian family & visit the place where our Grandfather came from.   We visited the graveyards where our Great-Great grandparents & Great-Great-Great Grandparents are buried. We saw the places where they worked, the places they lived, & we learned something about the family history of his siblings & parents who didn't come to America. In some ways it was like going home, a feeling that is hard to explain, but it was like suddenly the traditions, the stories, the images became tangible. Knowing that we were walking in the same places that our ancestors walked gave me the real sense of finally knowing where I come from.

One of the things that really stood out while we were in Norway were the Norwegian flags, they were everywhere, even on little row boats tied to docks in the fjords.

Patriotism is often defined as love for or devotion to one's homeland.  The pride of home and country was so evident everywhere we went in Norway. Although Norway is where my ancestors came from, it isn't my home, I am part of the melting pot that is now the United States. A mixture of many different ethnic cultures make me who I am...that & the prairie I call home.

Thinking about all of that, of course made me think about the Native American people who are the original inhabitants of the country we call America.  The pride, honor and love they have for this sacred land is evident in their history, their traditions & the ceremonies they have passed on through the generations, for thousands of years. Somehow I knew I needed to create a red, white & blue quilt that would honor their story.

On Tuesday morning I woke up with the image of a fancy dancer in my head. Years ago I painted
Christmas Tree ornaments for a living. I had a number of designs that were favorites to paint and big sellers. One was a silhouette of little a fancy shawl dancer, I must have painted 100's of this particular design, there was something so joyful and happy about this little dancer.
I knew I had my quilt.

The more I dug through the mess in my workroom the more ideas I had. I thought about making a silhouette in dark blue, but then I found a roll of string & I thought it would be fun to create movement with fringe. I also wanted a bright pop of color so I made her shawl red.

I knew I needed a plume, it had to be real & it had to be white. The only place  I knew there would be a feather was the barn, so I spent a good hour in the cold hunting through grouse feathers with the mantra "one white feather" going through my head...and I found one!

I used the darkest blue fabric I had to make my dancers head & then quilted hair with a dark blue thread, adding white zig zags to represent the ties on her braids.

I still had red beads from the first challenge so I thought it would be fun to do some more beading,  I
beaded leggings & added some beads to the shawl. I also glued beads to the feather and sewed beads onto the button that holds the plume to her hair.

If you google Fancy Dancer, the beautiful array of colors is the first thing that will catch your eye, my red fabric shawl felt flat even after I added ric-rack & the fringe to it, so I put a piece of iridescent white tulle over the top of it. Not sure if that really made a big difference but it felt better.

I quilted the little quilt onto a piece of felt because I wanted the back to be free of thread so I could write on it. Of course I saved the plume till last and sewed it right through all the layers, so much for a thread free backing.

On the back of the quilt I added the American flag and the flags from the countries where my ancestors came from, I left off the yellow on the Swedish flag and the black and gold on the German flag since it's a red, white & blue only challenge. This makes it look like my ancestors came from Zwolle a city in the Netherlands & Atlantico a department of Columbia!  LOL
Then just because I love little Jul Tomte I added one waving a peace flag :) you can see he is blue with cold!

I bound the quilt using the same dark blue that I used for my dancers hair. My quilt is 8 X 11inches.

While working on my little quilt I kept thinking about the political upheaval we are currently
surrounded with, I didn't want this to be a political quilt...but you know it is :)

So that is where I will leave it & share with you the song that has been in my head all week....

Song of Peace (from Finlandia)
words but Lloyd Stone, music by Jean Sibelius

This is my song, O God of all the nations
A song of peace, for lands afar and mine
This is my home, the country where my heart is
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine
But other lands have sunlight, too, and clover
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine
O hear my song, oh God of all the nations
A song of peace for their land and for mine