A Magical Map Of The Journey Of Life

No ... not the secret of life or anything Earth shattering like that ... it is the title of a quilt I made for Mum and Dad, for Christmas:

I made this using some rust/etc dyed fabric I made ... I was just talking about it in an e-mail I posted to a yahoogroup I am in ... I was explaining about how to "dye" fabric with rusty nails/bury it in the garden/etc ... so, instead of explaining it again - here is what I said in the e-mail:

Another interesting and cheap (which is one reason why I tried it) way to play with making fabric go different colours is to do "rust dying" and stuff like that - bits of white fabric, calico, etc light colour fabric can be wrapped up with rusty nails/wire/iron filings/etc and/or garden mulch and stuff ... and buried in the garden for a night or a week (have read about doing it for a week but I have only done it overnight) ... or just put the fabric with its rusty stuff/garden mulch/gum leaves/etc in a bucket in the laundry

... I have been told that it works best if you add salt and/or vinegar to it - makes the rusty stuff rust more quickly ... and if it rusts while it is in the fabric the rust ends up on the fabric - which is what you want .

This journal quilt is made from a bit of my "rust dyed" fabric (the journal quilts are what I said was my "yearquilt" for last year - I did one each month, along with a whole group of us from an artquilters yahoogroup).

I think I wrapped the bit of fabric around some rusty nails, copper wire, etc, threw in a few of the wood chips from the mulch in the garden (half rotten ones with dirt mixed in ;-) made sure it was nice and wet, and plonked it in a bucket with some more dirt/mulch thrown on top ... then, because I am not a patient person , I dragged it out again the next day and it was already nice and rusty and wonderful looking , so I shook off all the rusty bits and stuff and rinsed off the dirt/etc, then threw it in with a load of washing to make sure that what colour was on there was going to still be there after a wash (no - none of the colour ran or washed out - I didn't expect it to either - I know that rust stains stuff ).

I also made a quilt for Mum and Dad out of some of that rusty fabric ... they have retired and do a lot of travelling, so I made them a small quilt for their campervan ... I made it to look like a map, so it has contours and roads and a railway line and map symbols for buildings etc ... and because Mum quilts and dad does woodwork/etc in his shed, I named the town "Quilt Town" and one of the hills is "Hardware Hill" ... I don't think I have a photo on my blog yet ... but I might see if I can put one there shortly ...

so ... here I am ... TRYING to put the photo up ... but it isn't working ... grrr ...

(oh well ... I will just have to save this as a draft and try again tomorrow ... either blogger is not working, or the problem could be at this end ... been a while since the computer has been re-started ... and I am not going to fiddle and try stuff now because it is now about 1:30am - well and truly time I was asleep!)

< the next evening ... >

Grrrr ... still not working ...

< andrea goes to help pages, looks at some stuff, opens up another variety of browser and logs in again using that >

It worked at last! - booo for "Internet Exploder", yaaaaaay for Firefox :-)

btw, All the roads and the rivers and train tracks in the quilt are stitched on (some of them over a coloured line that I drew on first) but the buildings and names, and the tree symbols, are drawn on with fabric markers ... 2 reasons - 1: I wasn't sure I could sew them neatly enough and have them look right, and 2: I wanted to get it finished and send it, so Mum and Dad got the quilt before next Christmas - lol

oh - I also coloured in "Lake Lovely" with a pale blue highlighter!

(whatever works - LOL ... I figured that in the unlikely event that the quilt needed washing, and by some chance the blue lake all washes out- then Mum, or whoever washes it, can quite easily grab a blue highlighter/etc and colour the lake back in again ... )

hmmmm ... the spell checker is back (maybe it always was here but currently only works in the firefox browser?) ... it keeps picking up my Aussie spelling of the word Colour! (yes - in Australia, and England, that word IS spelt with a U in it ... it always has been - it's just that the population of another large country decided not to bother using it :-)