100 Days of Tiny Abstract Appliqué - The Fabric Book

One more finished exhibit!

I wrote a post about my participation in this year’s 100 Day Project back in April in this post. For my second attempt at this online art project I chose to make 3” blocks of Tiny Abstract Appliqué all hand stitched using solid fabric scraps.

I didn’t quite manage to keep up with a daily practice very often but I did finish all my blocks just a few weeks after the final day at the start of June.

Since then they have been sitting around waiting for me to have time to stitch them all together to make a fabric book. This finally happened two weeks ago and this project has been patiently waiting in a queue for a blog post.

Before they became a 3-dimensional object I managed to get a couple of photos of them on the design wall. Here are the first 64 blocks documented at the time of finishing them…

And here are all 100 blocks taken a couple of weeks ago just prior to ‘book binding’.

I used this design wall documentation process to plan out each 9 block page as I went along, trying to keep a nice balance of different motifs and trying not to repeat any background colours.I then set about sashing each block with a charcoal solid (Dashwood Pop Charcoal).

This is the latest in a number of themed fabric books I’ve made and each one presents a different challenge due to the ‘page maths’. For this one I would either need to choose a 12 page book and only have room for a cover (which would need to include the final hundredth block) or a 16 page book and find some content for a few spare pages.

I decided on the latter option which gave me space for a front and back cover and an information page. The single block now has it’s own page and I found some rejected ‘improv checkerboard’ that I thought could be an ‘end page’ for the inner back cover (above).

For the front cover I recreated some of my favourite motifs from the book on a lovely turquoise background, leaving space in the centre for the embroidered text (stitched with Aurifil 12wt wool).

For the back cover I chose my favourite of all the blocks (well at that time it was my favourite, this may well change at some point!) and enlarged it to fill the whole frame.

I tried to make each block different to the others but it did get increasingly hard to find new subjects. Sometimes they are only different because I turned them upside down! I kept a notebook with thumbnail sketches of all my ideas and crossed them off as I used them. I found ideas all around me, there are interesting shapes everywhere! The best source of inspiration turned out to be all the app icons on my phone (see if you can spot any in the design wall photo above!).

I cut the backgrounds using rotary cutter and ruler but most of the shapes were cut freehand with scissors or cutter just by looking at my sketches (a method I’m increasingly using as I seem to have become allergic to templates!).

Though I love the look of these blocks made of bright bold solid cottons the actual fabric it’s nowhere near as pleasurable to sew as the linen/woven type of fabric I have been using for my needle turn appliqué over the last couple of years and I am very pleased to be back to hand stitching with this fabric now. However I absolutely love the look of this whole book and the cover makes me especially happy.

My quilts are starting to divide between bright bold solid cottons (like Giant Trilobite and Jukebox) and more muted softer linens (like Moon Trees and The Crows are Calling) so I think it’s fitting that both these styles will also be represented in the two 100 Day Fabric Books at my exhibition.

The book measure 10” and will be displayed alongside my first ‘100 Days’ fabric book on a plinth at my Festival of Quilts Textile Gallery, with my Temperature Fabric Book on a separate plinth. Visitors will be allowed to flick through the books and view every page using their own hands (as long as you’re not covered in jam or something!).

In other news I have spent last week signing, packing and shipping ALL the book and thread box pre-orders! The last of them left here on Thursday and it has been wonderful to get lovely feedback messages from customers who have already started to receive their books.

Of course you can still order the new book at any time by clicking on the button below.

One more new quilt to reveal before I head to Birmingham, so see you back here next week for that!