Annies Crazy World

This weekend I worked on the left hand wall and have stitched little flowers all in a row…I have repeated some flowers from the other side and added some different ones.

I have started adding garden to the second side of my bag…The second wall isn’t going to have has many flowers covering it so I have used trimmed the bottom with some fluffy grass looking thread, I have added some bushes in the bottom corner to balance the ones on the other side and this afternoon I got the trunk for a Whisteria stitched, I used a piece of wire in one branch so that it sticks up above the wall to give the top of the Whisteria a little shape…I have also painted the path.

How Much is enough? How do you know when to stop? commonly asked crazy quilt questions that have no one answer as the answer for each project is different depending on such things as what funtion the project is for, how difficult the stitching (denium is tough and hard on the hands to stitch), how much time you have and the personal likes of the maker and who the project is for (some people like a no fuss look, for others the more detail the better).

I was asking myself this question last night when I was adding flowers to the garden…In the wee small hours of this morning I decided that enough was enough…the more detail I put on this side the more I have to put on the other side to Balance it and the denim is tough to sew and I am running out of time and…and I still have insects and birds and little creatures and Fairys to add…Yes there is enough flowers in the Garden.

Yesterday I was wandering how I could describe the techniques that I am using to make my bag..Although I am using crazy quilt embellishments and I will draw heavily on my crazy quilt stash before it is finished, it is Not Crazy quilting….I am am adding embroidered detail but not enough to call it an embroidery…Thus far it is more applique than anything else, applique was the first quilting technique that I learnt, I used to do detailed picture applique and this has reminded me of those works but with all the beads and charms that I will add what I am doing goes beyond applique…after thinking through all these elements I decided that I would call it “Embellished applique”…

While I was writing the above I had the camera batteries recharging so that I could show you the stitching progress….I got a little carried away with the rocks and they not only surround the pond, they also line the path. the rocks at the front are padded the ones at the back aren’t and a lot of the rocks are only partially pieced on so that they have little pockets/caves for me to slip things behind the rocks…I have also done a test paint on a scrape of denim and am thinking that I will paint the path on, I was going to applique pathing stones but I am feeling as if I want a change of texture and a painted path will do that…

I found a small piece of fancy fabric that I think will make good water and have stitched on a pond shape in the forground of my garden and I have made a few rocks to go around the pond, I have stuffed the rocks with a little batting to make them 3 dimensional.

I embroidered some Colonial knot flowers onto the wall while it was a seperate piece and easier to work on, I probably should have done a few more because it is now harder to stitch but my desire to have it stitched in place got the better of me and I have stitched the wall to the Jeans, I left the top of the wall between the pocket and the fly open so that I have an extra little pocket…I like the way it looks and I have now started to add smaller beaded flowers to the forground of the Garden.

When I started my Bag I got very excited and had more ideas than I had space on the bag or time to stitch…and now having let several weeks slip by without touching it I have even less time…Time now for a reality check…..I picked it up last week and decided that the first thing to do was to get the background layer in place and I have stitched the first wall into place, I stitched the top of the pocket to the back of the wall before stitching the sides and bottom,so that The pocket is still functional.

I saved time by only stitching the bricks that will be visible to the second wall.

And I have started covering it with plants and flowers cut from fabric and appliqued on.

Aside a lack of time I had been having problems marrying my embellishments to the structure of the Jeans…the wall had to go up where it covers the pockets and because the fly in the centre interrupted my design I have postioned the wall so that the fly is partially covered and the gap for the gate so that it draws the eye away from the fly, my problem being that If I am covering the features of the Jeans I might as well not use Jeans to start with? but it was the love of Jeans that excited me about the bags of fun in the first place…Yesturday I had a light bulb moment that actually solved both problems…I won’t embellish the Back which will save time and by leaving the back looking like Jeans I can let the embellishments flow a little way around to the back taking the eye onto the Jeans and then the jeans will flow back into the embellishments as the loops of the Jeans and the button will say Jeans and the cloads under the loops flow down into my embellishment.

When I showed my Visual Diary Page to Sharon she suggested a few ideas and then we started tossing ideas back and forth…I added the new ideas in black pen so that you can spot the differences there is a larger photo at Flicker… there is now way to many ideas to fit on the bag but it is great to have lots to choose from.

One of Sharon’s ideas was things that get lost in the garden and down the bottom left corner is a cluster of things that get lost in the garden…one of them is a ring pull from a can, in my head I wanted one of the old ones and low and behold today I came across one that I had dug out of the garden sometime in July and tossed to the side…I must have known that I would want one sometime…It is rather large for my garden so I will have to make a rock to hide it under and just have a corner sticking out…I think that I will leave the soil on it, just for effect.

When I started thinking about where to put things on my bag I was fighting with it because in my head I was not sure wether I was designing with the features of the jeans or wether I should ignore them…After talking it through with Sharon it seemed my problem was that the fly is to central and the slope of the pockets to steep for what I want to do so I decided that I would leave the band and belt hooks exposed to keep a connection to the Jeans but below that I would cover most of them….With a clearer picture of what I wanted in my head I packed up the pieces and headed to visit friends for 8 days of R & R (that’s rest and recouperation) while there I got 2 fence posts done and started a second wall…The fence posts will form a gate which will have a Wysteria covered arch over it, one of the Fence posts will stick just a little way over the fly which puts the gate off center and covers the fly but still allows the zipper to be a pocket….When friend first saw the finished wall she thought that it was a printed fabric or painted on….when she looked at it with her glasses on she looked at me and told me to “get a life”, which is a private joke between us being her way of telling me that I am getting carried away with paffinicky detail….and she did bring me to my sences as I realized that I was planning on putting bushes in front of the fence which will cover most of it anyway so I will cut bush shapes out of floral fabrics and put them on and only brick the bits that show…

Where does inspiration come from?…I had been hesitating as to what I wanted to do on my bag but when I saw Mann’s it inspired me and images started coming into my head….Mine will be nothing like Mann’s but what her bag did for me was to free up my thoughts and remember that this is for fun….Mann writes her Blog Hegeldab in Estonian but is writing her bags of fun entrys in English for which I thank her, I was first attracted to her bag because I liked that she used overalls instead of jeans and I liked the colours of her freeform crochet and then when I looked just a few days later she had learnt just a few basic stitches from Sharon’s stitch dictionary and using her crochet thread, had stitched fish allover her bag…I looked at them and thought “Wow, she has had fun”, they looked fresh and bright and they released my mind to daydream of what would be FUN to do on my bag….My mind went back to the time I spent in the Fairy Garden when I was making Another World, stitching that garden had been great fun and I have decided that a fantasy/fairy garden is what I wanted on my bag…

Theme decided I sat down with my Visual Journal and started sketching out the things that I want to put into my fairy garden below is what I ended up with…

Time to stitch…the first thing that I need to do is to put in the background features and I have started with the rock wall…My first idea was to try painting the rocks…didn’t work, next I tried embroidering the cracks between the rocks…

I did one row and decided that I didn’t like it…

…Next Idea…To applique each rock….

I think that this is going to work…If the scale is to big I will just have to cover it in Vines and flowers…

Comments: 3

sharlee on 22 August 2005
Hi there Annie,
Your sketch of your proposed bag took me right back to a story I wrote for a creative writing course I did a number of years ago – I think I wrote about it somewhere just a couple of weeks ago… It was about a little girl whose family members made a quilt – I decided in my wisdom that the quilt would have a fairy theme – and being a mostly non quilter – I had to refer to books on the actual construction – but I remember drawing? a rough sketch just so I had some sort of ‘lead’ to what I was doing… It had all sorts of fairy related stuff… Somewhere in the archives of my house it still exsists… If I find it I will post it on my blogger – the most important words here – if I find it… LOL I have just had another brain wave – but it is too daunting even to think it further… Ohhhh – my head hurts…

anniescrazyworld on 23 August 2005
Hi Sharlee,
When brain waves hit it is time to pull out the Visual Journal…The good thing about Visual Journals is that sketching out an idea is not a commitment to making it but can help you decide if it is worth pursuing or not…some ideas will go no further, some will develop and bear fruit immediately, others will lay dormant, maybe for years awaiting there time yet others will mutate and emerge in a different form.

Nicky Perryman on 24 August 2005
Love your sketchbook page – its really cute!! Lots of nice ideas there.

I had to go through the pile of jeans a couple of times to find a suitable pair because I want my bag to be smaller than the waist of the jeans which means taking a piece out….when I found this pair I was happy because they have an extra seam near the sides on the front which I can use as the sides of my bag, I can then cut the excess fabric out of the back which gives me a smaller bag but retains the Look of the jeans.