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.