PRIGANART   Art Quilt, Art Fashion & Sewing Tutorials              

Children must be taught to grow their own wings and how they will fly when they do! I have been working on bringing all my classes online in the format of pdf lessons with accompanying videos and am creating a sewing course to teach children sewing from A-Z.

I have been playing around with this idea for a while. To create wearables using my landscape patchwork techniques. My process takes a while. I think about it, experiment in my head, look at fabrics and then begin to play.

Its October already, skies are beginning to get cloudy and the evenings a bit cooler. Its time to make some t shirt tunics from that pile of t shirts which need to be upcycled. A pile of purples for the first t shirt tunic. Some stained, some small school shirts. I have been collecting purples for a while.

When teaching I make a point of only using upcycled and second hand fabrics. I teach deconstruction and reconstruction and use up every bit down to the threads so that there is no textile waste.

Looking for new ways to upcycle fabric scraps and create new interesting fabrics. Today I played with pleats and will show you what I did with the fabrics that were on my table today

Last week a student chose all of the floral fabrics that she could find in the scrap box to create a floral garden wave landscape patchwork piece.

Endless fabric scraps in many different sizes. I decided to make a 4 seasons series of one inch magic fabric pieces. So I sorted them into one inch pieces according to the 4 seasons. These fabrics can be framed and used as art pieces as is, or can be used as fabrics to create other products, bags, pouches, fabric bracelets or necklaces and can even be used to create pockets, collars and cuffs on shirts and jackets.

I have many wave landscape patchwork pieces. Some are for the exhibition which I will be having with my students and many are samples for classes. Most of them I gift but sometimes I use the quilted patchwork fabric to create other products. I had that large 4 season piece which I had not yet quilted and backed and I decided to make something practical, 2 zippered pouches out of it. Zippered pouches are things that one can never have too many of. I find hundreds of use

I needed something in pink shades to complete an outfit. Some sort of accessory. I already have a button necklace but wanted something a bit more boho and casual. A t shirt necklace is what I wanted, so I went to the remnant pile to see what size of t shirt remnants I had in pinks.

I tell my students that the most important thing when choosing colors to my mind is not the color wheel, it is what they feel. Text book jungle colors can be different shades of greens and browns. I went to a search engine and asked for jungle colors. I found certain palettes but I also found childrens books and there the colors were different, reds and yellows and many shades of greens and oranges as well.

I provide most of the fabrics, upcycled sheets and clothing but they have to bring a few personal pieces to incorporate into the quilt. They have 2 options, they can either stich a rag quilt with flannel batting, or a squares quilt with a fleece or flannel backing. Not so classical quilting.

I still use classical quilt techniques but modified to my style especially when I teach sewing. I use the log cabin block and call it a magic square when teaching sewing. The first project of students is to create a square and then a pillow cover from that square. They get to use scraps availabe in the scrap box that week to create their squares and pillow covers.

People ask me if I do classical quilting. Yes I do, specifically to gift or if I need another patchwork blanket. My focus today, is on teaching and creating art quilts. Today I sorted some of my photo albums, I am making an effort to digitalize my photos and I found an album with photos that I had taken at an exhibition that I had given 35 years ago. My go to was the log cabin pattern. I have always used upcycled fabrics and always had strips and odd small pieces of

The students finished their wave landscape patchworks

have been working quite diligently to prepare the pieces for my 50 piece exhibition of the Wave Landscape Patchwork Technique. Of course my students have seen my works and they know that I am nearing completion. 2 weeks ago they came to me together and told me that they had decided to each create a piece and would I allow them to participate. Of course my answer was yes, in fact if I had known that they wanted to participate I would have let them make many more pieces.

While working on my #45 wave landscape patchwork piece I looke at the fabrics and saw that I had a bunch of strips and wondered how many versions I could create today.

Here is a bit of bling.

The end of winter is nearing so I began sorting the umbrellas that I had used and found this broken umbrella. I initially tried to reattach the metal frame but parts of it had broken. I took a good look at it to see what I could salvage from it and came to the conclusion that if I unpicked the metal frame I would have a decent sized piece of nylon fabric which after some reconstruction could serve as a good strong lightweight shopping bag, I could make something practical

I break the fabric storage down into sections, boxes of sheets and larger pieces, medium sized pieces, small pieces and the last - crumbs and scraps. All sorted according to the color seasons. I had still too many boxes of crumbs so I decided to create "fabric" pieces out of them and from those to create practical items and I will be using up crumbs.

I had a bunch of narrow strips left over when creating last week and decided to make some woven fabric from them.