I’m loving these

Stitched vessels, collaged cotton, silk, brocade, wool and organza strips with machine stitching and fabric glue on inside.
Check out more of Lauren’s recycled textiles here.
I’ve touched her textiles with my own fair hands, and they’re as soft and sumptuous as they are beautiful.
While Googling Lauren, I also found this wonderful jewellery by Amanda Caines.

Is there anything better than MicroRevolt’s knitPro? This can be used to adapt mega-crop logos for righteous handcrafting. Or for flowers. It superimposes a grid on top of your image, and spits it out as a PDF for printing. It also offers the appropriate stitch size.

Needlepoint, Cross Stitch, Crochet (1:1)
Knit Portrait (5:7)
Knit Landscape (7:5)

But today, I saw another tool that might be handy: Digital Stained Glass tool. Weaving Major created a butterfly that looks like stained glass using Digital Stained Glass ® and PixelBlocks. Wow that stuff is cool. Looks even better that LiteBright!

It occured to me (and probably to others!) that this could be used to make gridded -patterns, like cross-stitch. This is what the tool interface looks like below.

If you’ve ever tried to do this using Photoshop, you might be able to appreciate how handy this is. You can specify how many squares you want to to take up. In the next steps, you can enhance the image. It “dithers” the pattern so you can use a limited palette. But it only makes a square grid suitable for cross-stitching (and PixelBlocks, of course!)

Structures #29, ©2004 87″ x 61″

Lisa Call makes contemporary, geometric quilts. According to her biography, “Her work is abstract but draws elements from many places: her love of the colors and geological forms of the southwest, her interest in human-made structures for containment such as fences and stone walls, and her exploration of her own internal psychological walls and boundaries.” Her Structures series uses all hand dyed fabrics. The pieces are hand-cut, and then pieced improvisationally. The quilting is dense and meticulous. It is a slow, meditative process, and her work invokes that same calm.

Structures #29, © 2004 34″x 53″

Ms. Call also has a wonderful blog that provides insight into the “who, what, where, why, when and how” of her artwork. It’s a rare thing to be able to delve into the creation of these quilts and see her evolution as an artist over the years. She also posts workshop reviews, tutorials, and her views on the quilting world at large.

Paula Sanz Caballero is an embroidery artist living in Spain, who makes these really complex illustrations from fabric and thread. Her work appears in magazines and other publications, and she also makes cards for Roger La Borde.

Snip from an article in Embroidery Magazine on embroidery as illustration:

For almost seven years now she has been telling stories with needle, thread and fabric swatches. Born into a family of more than four generations of textile merchants, as a child she played among piles of fabric. However, her work does not draw exclusively on the past, instead it combines technology and tradition. By merging elements she feels she gains the best of both worlds. ‘Artists often feel that in order to be “contemporary” they must limit their work to new technology and that it is necessary to separate themselves from everything related to tradition. How then must the observer for whom anything related to textile work, except for fashion design, is usually considered as a domestic labour or craft, approach works in this medium? If the artist himself does not see textile art as a valid medium, it is impossible for the observer to do so.’

(via poppytalk)