K.I.S.S. and struggling to submit

In December, Dijanne Cevaal put out an on-line challenge which she called "K.I.S.S."--the acronym for "Keep It Simple Stupid." I don't know how many of us responded, but we were to make 50 cm quilts (about 20" square) using two colors (they were supposed to be solids in order to emphasize the simple aspect) and we were to use threadwork (running or straight stitch only) in any way in as many colors as we wished.

I think Dijanne intends to put them up somewhere, but she's been teaching in Europe and recently was called home to Australia, cutting her trip short.

Mine is fairly simple. It is based on a microscopic view of a feather taken by James Brittin. James nicely gave me permission to render his work in fiber. You can see his work here.

I used a white cotton sateen and Kona black cotton. The thread was pearl cotton and crochet cotton (variegated blues/violet). The perfect small stitch was done as bobbin work (which I had never had the intestinal fortitude to try until now).


I used Quilter's Dream Green batting...NOT a good choice. Quilter's Dream Green is made from recycled plastic bottles...but it is VERY flat and hard to needle through by hand...well, lets put it this way, I used 2 layers to try to get some loft and needling through it with the pearl cotton was miserable. I thought I was going to break my fingers trying to pull the needle.

I have been doing a lot of nature quilts lately and Martha Sielman is doing a new Art Quilt book for Lark publications on nature quilts. I was thinking about submitting this one, but I wasn't sure about it. I ended up sending in a shot of my Great Blue Heron at Sunset....but I'm not sure that that was a good idea either.

I was having a heck of a time getting good shots of it. I think I need to take a class on how to get my digital camera to do more for me....of course I was also sort of in a hurry as I have had a friend from Connecticut visiting...I sent the shots in after snarling at trying to get it uploaded as a .tif file (I failed), and the shot which had great balance and lighting also managed to be one which slightly cut off the bottom right edge of the quilt....I didn't notice it when I shot it (it was really close and barely missed)....and it included a strip of the insulating foam I used as the support.

I probably shouldn't have bothered and just forgotten about it. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained...you can't be included in things if you don't even try. So...off it went. And this one stayed home.