Music Man

Finally have Sandstone completed! My husband helped draw the figure, I had technical assistance from Anne with the freemotion quilting.

Sylvia

Sandstone - finally

Here is my sandstone piece finally. I was originally going to try to dye fabric with sandstone, kinda like those red dirt shirts, and do a 'shades of sandstone' quilt, but as you can see that didn't workout too well. How do they do that? I wound up with a couple pastel pieces of fabric. I used one of those pieces on the back. Then I thought I would do a sandstone border for a photo I took of some flowers growing in sandstone. The finished piece I have here was to be the border only, but I liked the way it came out, so here it is, no flowers. It is a piece of ultra-suede that I used variegated thread on. It originally had square corners that looked terrible after I tried to miter them with a zig-zag border stitch - works well when you are doing it in the middle of a quilt, not so well on an edge, at least for me. So I cut them off and rounded them, now I can sleep at night. Below are some detail photos. Now if I can only get to 'peace' and 'frog'.

OK Finally, I was having computer issues. I don't think I'm going to continue with the faces... can't think of anything to do for the next WORD... it seemed to me that doing faces with hats would be a good idea...but maybe not..

angela

Sandstone

Updated photo of Anne's Sandstone piece.

Sandstone-Delicate Arch

Sandstone....what images this word evolks. Southern Utah with all its beauty. Delicate Arch, Landscape Arch, Zions, Bryce, and all the red rock elegance. This quilt is a pattern by Carol Johnson from Nibley, Utah. The top was given to me by Martha Dickey. I decided to finish it by adding the borders, and quilting it. What memories I have from the many trips I took to Arches National Park with my husband and two children. Now in cloth I can perserve one of them.

Kaye Evans

My version of Sandstone comes from a photo I took of Uluru, or Ayer's Rock, on our last trip to Australia. I used curved piecing with freezer paper, ala Caryl Bryer Fallert, and stitched like crazy (ala...me!). Except for the little insert of stripey fabric on the right side of the rock, all other color variation on the rock was done with thread. The only things missing from the photo/quilt are the flies that continually buzzed around our heads, which were protected with nets.

Sandstone

I must say that this 12x12 project has been a real challenge for me. Working "fast" (yes, 2 months is fast for me) and "small" puts me out of my comfort zone. Which is good! I will definitely learn from this experience. I've already learned that I shouldn't care too much about deadlines where art is concerned. Right? Is that a good excuse? And to simplify!!!! I love what Lisa Chin did with the chennile technique. And Leslie's wool roving was beautifully done.

Anne

Leave No (Sand)stone Unturned

Was the back, now is the front.
Was front, now the back.

Like others, I Googled "sandstone" and also looked up some of the formations in a book, found a couple pictures I liked, chose the fabrics and threads, then just messed around with it. I was disappointed with it until I turned it over and looked at the back more carefully. The back actually looked better, I thought, so it became the front. And that also inspired me to call it "Leave No (Sand)stone Unturned."
Nancy

Sandstone in Wool

Looking at pictures on the internet, I came across a very colorful sandstone picture that I tried to emulate with my quilt block. I used wool roving in several colors and hand felted it on a wool background.

Leslie

A glorious Week-end

Having just returned from Arches National Park in Moab two weeks prior to our chosen word it was easy for me to paint a picture of one of the arches there. Acrylic paints were applied to muslin fabric and it was machine quilted with coordinating thread. I straight-stitched several times around the edge for the binding.

Marsha

Kolob Canyon

When we got "the word," I immediately got an image of what I wanted to do and how to do it. I wanted to make stack n slash blocks, or what Sylvia calls EZ Crazy, but decided to sew two fabrics together with curved piecing before I started slashing and rearranging. When I went to my fabric stash to pull fabrics from my orange bin, I found leftover strata from my Beach Party Strips and Curves class that I took from Louisa Smith at Empty Spools last spring. The colors were perfect, so I paired them up with batiks. I had some pictures of what they looked like before I started slashing, but they got lost in the camera or something. I added some deserty green browns for the canyon floor, and a few bits of blue because I love the sosuthern Utah combination of water and desert. The blocks ended up being quite small, so the curved piecing doesn't show up as much as I had envisioned. So I curved the outside edges of the quilt instead. And then added some blooming desert plants.

Many Sandstones

When I first heard the word for this challenge, I thought of Delicate Arch in Moab, and I thought most of us would think the same thing. Also, knowing what beautiful Batiks Anne has done on the subject of sandstone I felt a bit intimidated. I tried to "mix it up" by thinking of crazy things I could do to make Sandstone really different: make layers of sandstone in blue, or make the layers using zippers, or something not natural like a building made out of sandstone but in the end one of the things that kept calling me was petroglyphs. I found this cool petroglyph of Ghanaskidi, the Hump-backed God and really fell in love with the image. The second link is of the actual petroglyph and the first link is of a replica someone made which I translated into this reverse applique.

I really like how this turned out with the curls of the Batik behind the hand dyed fabric but I haven't quilted it yet because after talking with my son another idea kept bugging me. My son told me that sandstone wasn't an image for him, but rather a texture and so I played in my mind with different ideas of how I could create sandstone texture without actually glueing sand to the fabric. I came up with this:

Basically it is the same idea as that used in making faux chenille. I layed a large number of small scraps onto a piece of batting creating about three layers. The scraps were arranged in random directions. I then put a solid piece of fabric on the top and back and stitched lines all over the fabric in a pattern I had seen in many sandstone pictures on the internet. After I stitched, I cut between the stitches and viola! multicolored layers of texture. They are soft layers, so maybe not the rough texture I was looking for tactilly but more visually rough.

Here is a close up of some of the cut through layers.

I really, really liked this idea and decided to try to take it one step further by making another layered sandstone quilt and then "carving" an arch from it and placing it on a sky:

I don't like this quilt as much as I like the plain sandstone because I used a printed batik for the outerlayer instead of a solid. The underlayers don't seem to show through as well, and the dark outerlayer and dark blue background isn't enough of a contrast in value so the whole thing is reading dark to me. If I decide to do it again I'll change up the values. This might be something fun to try in a bigger size!

I can't wait to see what everyone else has come up with!