PRIGANART   Art Quilt, Art Fashion & Sewing Tutorials              

I love my Wednesday class. I teach sewing to children and from 16:00 onwards there is a creative hum in the air. They are busy as bees. Today each one worked on a different project. Some of them come early but I don't start teaching until 16:00. They know that if they come early they have to be productive. I set them to sorting and cutting fabrics for their projects.

I am working on another tutorial and auditioning fabrics for the sample. I made a pact a few years ago not to ever buy fabric again. So when I am designing something I need to be creative. I first envision the design and then the colors. I allow myself to play with tones because I don't always find what I see in my head in the fabric boxes that I have. So flexibilty and creativity is what is called for. I envisioned an ocean but not just blues, turquoise and greens also

Holidays are coming up soon and its time to think of gift bags. I use zippered pouches for that they are very practical things.

Its the #IGQuiltFest2023 day 10 #upcycling Recreate. reduce, reuse, recycle, rework, rewear. I do keep all the scraps and even the threads when creating projects and upcycle and reuse them to recreate even more projects.

Yesterday they finished their large quilted patchwork pouch for all of their sewing supplies. The purpose of this lesson is to teach them the first zipper technique in a list of 5 different zipper techniques that I teach in the sewing classes. They also get to practice lots of sewing while quilting the outside fabrics of the pouch.

hey chose pinks, bold and light fabrics, for the body of the pouch and a white zipper each.

his week it is some magenta fabric beads made from these gorgeous fabric scraps from remnants of a tie dyed shirt

It was a tremendous task to pack them so that the unpacking would be practical. I packed according to subject and marked the boxes accordingly so it is not that daunting. Now to get started setting up the studio.

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.

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

What I enjoy doing the most is working with scraps. So I tell myself do what you do well! Working with fabric scraps. Giving them a new life. Creating techniques that simplify achieving appealing results.

To create another piece, just for the sake of creating? I have a few ways of dealing with this. The first is to take a break. I don't go near my studio, I read a book, go for a walk, watch a movie. Those are some of my options. But when in doubt, I just dance. Just to dance. I have my playlists, plug the earphones in and rumba and lambada around the house for about an hour. I am a different person after that.

t was interesting to work on it. It is not exactly a flow of a the 4 seasons piece. What I see is leaves and flowers through the 4 seasons.

I always create challenges for myself. When I completed the 4 seasons series I had many scrap pieces left over. I wanted to make one piece with merging all the 4 seasons flowing through each other using only the scraps left over. The palette was limited so the first thing I did was to sort the fabrics into the seasons.

Working with my winter fabrics this week. Crumb patchwork is so versatile - using the small pieces to create new fabric I first sort scraps according to the seasonal colors

Working on the 4 seasons series using only pieces from the scrap box was challenging. Winter was the final one in the series. All the seasons have all the colors, as they do in nature, but in different depths of color. I took out all the colors that had a flat, grey overlay for that winter feeling.

I am working on the final pieces for the Wave Landscape Patchwork exhibition and decided to do a set of the 4 seasons. Four individual...

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