After hearing her talk at London Quilters, I purchased Mary Gamester's book on transfer printing and a set of her paints. They lay unopened in a box ...

Now that my City &Guilds diploma course with Janice Gunner has started again, I need to make progress with some of the required pieces. I got the transfer prints out to make a small picture of an African headdress (more about this another time) and found I had no black or brown paint although in theory the brown could be mixed - luckily Janice was able to come to the rescue!

The printed image (on synthetic fabric, it doesn't work on cotton) comes out much lighter and brighter than the original.

I lay in bed wondering what to do for the Eastern Delights challenge at London Regional Day this weekend. I was reminded of a piece that Judy Fairless had shown us inspired by ceramic tiles. I thought that I could make a journal quilt of an Islamic tile using transfer paints to create the image. I searched online and downloaded this image from dreamstime.com.

I printed the image 8 inches square in greyscale and painted over the design with transfer paints before printing it on to evolon non-woven fabric.

I used minimal quilting and a faced binding to turn this into a journal quilt and entry for regional day challenge.

I sorted through my tea and iron dyed fabrics. My favourites were some little strips of linen and some wool wadding.

For my project, though, I wanted something less dramatic!

I settled on a piece of dyed linen table napkin for the background and some recycled muslin lining for the middle layer. The foreground is 18 squares cut from dyed and printed fabrics (thermofax images of feathers), some of which had feathers attached.

I love the result:

London Quilters have an exhibition from 17th November to 4th January at Swiss Cottage Gallery (www.londonquilters.org.uk). The private view with Tracy Chevalier will be on 20th November.

As a trailer for this exhibition, as part of the library's 50th anniversary celebrations, we will be mounting a display of 12 inch square quilts commemorating WW1. These will be on show from around 5th November.

Both my grandfathers fought in the war and, although both were wounded, they survived. My German grandfather was proud of his army service but this counted for nothing with the Nazis and he was later killed in a death camp.

I had photographs of both grandfathers in uniform. My friend Tricia Dickson showed me how to use Photoshop to reduce photos to an outline that could be used to make thermofax screens.

I printed these screens on to pieces of fabric dyed with tea and iron (see previous blog re Alice Fox and the cellar keys) using an ink/paste made from walnut husks thickened with gum tragacanth. I had to add a small amount of black screen ink to get some of darker images. The strips between the photos were printed using a commercial thermofax.

Earlier this year, Prism had an exhibition at the Mall Galleries. I absolutely loved the work that Alice Fox was exhibiting and decided to study her as part of my City & Guilds Diploma in Patchwork & Quilting.

I was then fortunate enough to see Alice demonstrating in the Virtual Studio at Festival of Quilts. I asked Alice how she created her leaf prints and she explained she dipped the fabric in tea and steamed it, often with added 'found' metal objects.

In one of the books on natural dyeing, I had read that sumac creates a yellow dye. We have lots of sumac trees in our French garden and I thought I would give it a go.

Alice does not use a mordant but, as I don't have a steamer, I decided to use alum-soaked recycled sheeting. Next, I needed some metal - which is where the key to the cellar comes in ...

I wrapped leaves and key together in fabric and boiled them for about an hour in tea. The results were interesting but rather dark. So, for batch two, I separated the wrapped keys from the wrapped leaves and boiled again in tea. Batch three was without tea.

I now have a selection of small pieces of fabric ranging from mottled yellow (just sumac leaves) through to quite dark greyish brown where the keys were wrapped and cooked in tea.

How I turn the fabric pieces into a quilt will be covered in a future post. Meanwhile, I will probably get a thermofax screen made of a sumac leaf and start collecting walnut husks to make walnut ink to print with!

This fabric clearly shows the outline of the sumac leaves but the keys are just part of a dark grey stain mixed with the rusty nails ...

Here the keys are more clearly visible!

I did include one other piece of metal in the pot - a bird shape that had fallen off a Tree of Life ornament. This created a soft (and to my eye, beautiful) image:

This little quilt is made with some of the less successful samples from my first marbling experiments:

It uses 2.5" squares sewn together in a simple grid.

I quilted in the ditch to stabilise before decorating the quilt with 'marbles' - circles stitched with a flower stitch foot with a shape in the middle to evoke the coloured stripe in a glass marble.

The quilt was trimmed to eight inches and finished with a satin stitch.

Done in time for the end of August deadline!

It is almost the end of August and I need to get my 8th journal quilt done for the 2014 Contemporary Quilt Group challenge. Where can I go for inspiration?

Got it, that very expensive marbling set I bought at the Festival of Quilts! So when I packed my bags for our long weekend in France, I packed some alum solution, some recycled cotton pillowcases (does anyone have a recipe for removing spider poo?), some metal baking trays and the marbling kit. Luckily, the tumble dryer condenser was full, so I had plenty of soft water. I had also picked up a book on marbling from London Quilters library.

I diluted the paints from the kit as instructed, made up the floater solution (yes, I know you can use cheap shaving foam, but I've already bought the kit). I then made a serious mistake - the book said add a little surfactant to the paints, but I think that's already included in the ones supplied in the kit. I took the opportunity to mix some colours as I particularly wanted to try with peacock feather colouring.

Anyway, after leaving everything overnight, I was up bright and early to have a go. The first piece was a disaster - only half took the colour - but the next couple worked well. However, after a while, I think the thickened water got too coated in surfactant.

A couple of pieces turned out quite well:

... and still plenty left to cut up for my journal quilt.

I should be able piece it today for quilting back in London and get it submitted on time.