Another ATC, this time the theme was skulls and I love Day of the Dead skulls. My original plan was to embroider them but when sketching out a design I decided to just keep them drawn. They were inspired by the lovely Day of the Dead skulls over at Lizmiera Etsy shop. The backing papers are from my favourite, Canon Creative Park, in their chiyogami section.
Boy Lacer liked these and called the bigger skull ‘big brother’ and the smaller skull ‘little sister’.
I thought I’d try my hand at art quilts now I’ve done a lap quilt, ummm as it turns out lap quilts are easier. It was for a swap bot swap and the theme was cupcakes.
This was my original idea just before I ripped it up.
I was just about to finish hemming it and in this photo it actually looks better than the final quilt I did do, but you can’t see that in one corner of the original quilt it’s badly puckered. So I rescued the cupcake embroidery and did a far simpler design.
The cupcake has been appliqued on with a small bit of toy stuffing underneath to make it more 3D.
My first and last art quilt for a while.
I don’t get on soap boxes much here but the recent outbreak of swine flu has raised one very interesting point that reminds me of the pig welfare programmes Jamie Oliver did a few months back. I’d recommend you watch this news report on the BBC news site which goes back to the village where they believe the swine flu outbreak started. The village is a short distance away from a large industrialised pig farm, something that has obviously been blighting the villagers existence for a long time and had been causing them health problems. The reporter then talks to a scientist who explains how susceptible pigs are to swine, avian and human flu and that in cramped conditions, they are just walking petri dishes for new viruses to form. You have to question how intelligent some humans are and ask when are we going to learn that by treating the animals we farm inhumanely we ultimately sow the seeds for our own health problems? Off my soap box now.
PS For the record, me, personally I’m not too stressed about swine flu right now (although my sympathies go out to anyone affected by it), I think a lot of it is media over reporting with unhelpful comparisons to things like the 1918 pandemic where actually our health care system was completely different and also ignoring the fact that yes even ‘normal’ flu kills people, which the media seems to have forgotten. But what I do think is interesting, like I say, is how our own actions as a race, can create new variants of diseases that affect us.
