Oshiwa Diamonds

Here's another example of a wild quilt made with my hand-stamped fabrics and Oshiwa blocks.  Of course there are about a gazillion African fabrics here too, along with some companion fabrics I stamped with other Oshiwa blocks. Too much fun!

Just to make the quilt worth looking at from the back as well as the front, I backed each block of the quilt with a different African print.  Sometimes I just want to look at the back! Here's a photo showing the back of the quilt.

I enjoy using lots of different fabrics together, after all, what's a stash for???  I wanted to show you a close-up so you could see a bit more detail of the fabric bits in the block.

When I put the binding on, I had a friend helping me.  Here's her photo as well......  Nice assistant, no? :)

"Out of Africa" 2013: African Quilting comes to Canada

I'm thrilled to announce that I will be teaching at the London International Quilt Festival in London, Ontario, Canada next spring!  LIQF is an annual weeklong event which is featuring the quilts and quilters of Africa in next year's edition "Out of Africa" 2013.  As Garnet Smalley, the head of LIQF, wrote me, "we started this exhibit to bring together quilters to learn about different cultures through the wonderful works of art the quilters make."  Next year's festival runs from June 12 to 15, and promises to be a colorful and exciting safari! Besides the classes, there will be an exhibition featuring African quilts, a selection of vendors to satisfy our shopping instincts, and a Gala Evening on Saturday, June 15th, with cocktails, dinner and live entertainment.  I'm packing my bags now! :)

I'll be teaching two sessions of my favorite 2-day fabric stamping workshop.  In this class, I teach printing with the wonderful hand-carved wooden blocks from Oshiwa Designs in Namibia, one of my former homes in Africa, covering everything from choosing fabric paint, tackling different surface design techniques for preparing backgrounds, embossing velvet, and foiling with the blocks.

Information on these workshops and the other fabulous classes which will be offered at LIQF will soon be listed at www.londoninternationalquiltfestival.com.
Info on the Oshiwa blocks used in the workshop and the artisans who carve them can be found at www.promoteafrica.org

I hope to see you in London in 2013!

Over-stamping African Fabrics

One of the techniques I like to do is over-stamping African fabrics with my Oshiwa blocks to add a design element and make them even more "African" if that's possible! In these photos, you can see a group of four African fabrics as they were when I bought them, and then photos of how I used them as backgrounds for the over-stamped images.  The over-stamped hexagons are in a quilt that I haven't quite finished yet....sound familiar? :) In class, I show the students a few examples like these, then I get to see what they decide to do with the technique.

One of the students in Kenya brought an African fabric with white shapes on a blue background to class.  She used one Oshiwa block to stamp with blue paint in the white areas and white paint in the blue areas.  She created a lovely design unique to her.  Isn't it well done?  I just had to show you! Beautiful!

Teaching in Kenya---last fall!

I have a lot of catching up to do on the blog, so let me begin with a wonderful two-week stay in Nairobi. I had the very great pleasure of being invited to visit the Kenya Quilt Guild in Nairobi to teach several classes and speak to their guild meeting. What a pleasure it was to fly over to East Africa and spend time in the company of a group of dynamic and creative quilters! I was incredibly lucky to meet new friends like my hostess Gill Rebelo, who is a wonderful cook as well as a very skilled quilter! She has an amazing collection of fabric pieces, many of which came from clothing she bought at the second-hand clothing market in downtown Nairobi. Making her quilts with the nice bits from these used blouses, shirts and so on puts Gill very much in the quilting tradition of recycling lovely fabrics while creating beauty---and gives her a huge "fabric shop" to hunt for bargains in!

I was also able to reconnect with Dena Crain, an immensely talented quilting teacher I first met online while I lived in Namibia! She teaches regularly online at Quilt University.com, which is how we "met" so I was happy to meet her in person in Canada a couple of years ago. Her blog is great---lots of quilts and tips, but also great photos of her life in the bush. You can find it at: http://www.denacrain.com/blog/

While in Nairobi I taugh Doodle Quilting, Fabric Stamping with Oshiwa blocks, and Try it Now! - a workshop on using lutradur, paintstiks, Angelina and other interesting materials in quilts. I'm posting a couple of photos from the classes, as well as a photo of Dena and me while we visited Karen Blixen's home. I'd wanted to see her farm and house ever since I saw Out of Africa, so it was definitely a highlight of the trip!

Gill and Dena took me around Nairobi to see all the important sights, which was terrific, but the best thing about going there was the experience of spending time with the ladies of the Kenya Quilt Guild. I can't thank them enough for taking me into their midst and treating me to two weeks of vibrant, stimulating, creative fervor! It was an absolute pleasure!

SAQA 2011 Benefit Auction

So I've made three small quilts now, one of which will be my submission to the SAQA 2011 Benefit Auction (http://www.saqa.com/) in September.

The first one is a series of small jewels of fabric I printed with my Oshiwa blocks in gold fabric paint on batiks, which I then embedded into a hand-painted background of black Kona cotton stitched with a double needle in an abstract grid pattern. The jewels are outlined in another batik, sewn in an adaptation of a bound buttonhole, familiar to people who actually sew clothing!

The second one is more simply composed of a double-needle-stitched background with three mini-quiltlets I printed with my Oshiwa blocks appliqued on top. Each of the mini-quiltlets has it's own batting and backing and is finished with muliple-thread satin stitching. On the left side I've attached some of my textured "strings" made of strips of fabrics, sheers, embroidery thread, and other stray bits from my sewing table, all stitched together by machine with an interesting thread. These "strings" here represent the grasslands that these African animals live in.

The third piece features a hexagonal print of a croc framed with a geometric block (both from Oshiwa of course) extensively quilted to make him at home in the nest of scraps of African fabrics I freemotion stitched all around him. I have quite a few African fabrics in my stash, and my scrap bag is still full-----I may have to make more pieces like this!

One of these will go to SAQA very soon...unless I have another idea and make yet another possible donation quilt. So many ideas, so little time! :)

Oshiwa Tiles

Spring is definitely here, so I think it's time to post some photos of random colorful items to accompany the flowers starting to pop up in the gardens of Ottawa. To start, here you can see some Oshiwa tiles I've made using my blocks and model magic. The model magic is very easy to use and dries withut cracking or hardening, so you can make all kinds of fun items, paint them, and sew them to your fiber art. The Oshiwa blocks work very well to give texture to the model magic, and can be painted to resemble metal, or anything else. Definitely a fun technique to play with!

The art quilt above is Windhoek Sunset. At the bottom of the quilt you can see another example of an Oshiwa tile painted with gold fabric paint. It looks like metal, but it's very lightweight and is sewn to the quilt. Photo by Annaliese Moyer.