Chairs and Stamping

Now that our house renovations have finally started, I can look forward to them being finished and start thinking about what will go into the newly renovated house. While flicking through some junk mail the other morning, I came across this lovely chair.

While I was working on the little quilt in the previous post, I had it thrown over one of my lounge chairs, how good would a chair look upholstered in my mini quilt! Ok lots of scraps need and hours of machining, but the end result would look amazing, sitting next to my planned little wood burner. Thinking about chairs, I remembered another long, long ago project I had in mind, we have here two very old leather chairs that sat in my mother in laws hall way, they come apart and the seat wraps around them so they can be moved around. I have no idea where she got them, but they always reminded me of something that would be taken on an african safari. A quick image search for old safari chairs came up with this image, which are very much like the two chairs I have, stashed away - somewhere......

The ones I have are actually nicer than these with a bit of wood turning on the legs and a second rail that goes all around the bottom. I had always intended to renew the leather seats, backs and arms and do some fanciful leather carvings on them. They would look so good on my lovely new back deck.

Ok back to reality, I have been playing around with stamps over the past few weeks, trying out lino, rubber blocks and sticky backed foam sheets to make them from. I really wanted  a nice horse stamp of a certain breed for my next little quilt. I tried the rubber block first as it was the easiest to carve, but didn't like the result, even with a new sharp lino cutting tool, I got crumbly edges and not very neat corners, so next tried the lino. Better image, but harder to print as was getting lots of lines from the background so my horse looked like he was standing in long grass, admittedly, I haven't mounted the lino onto a wooden block yet, which does help to get a cleaner print but I wasn't happy with the original image anyway. After a few tweaks to the horse, I cut it from the foam sheets and got a lovely clean print.

 Here are the three block and yes the horse is facing the other was in the foam block, which seemed to make a huge difference to the finished print.

 Here are some experimental prints, you can see what I mean about the long grass effect. I also did another little lino but wanted all those lines so this block worked well.

 Here are a few of the blocks I have been making. the stripes and checks are really effective. I used the small check in the previous quilt.

 And here are my final two border pieces printed and ready to go. The background for this one is a piece of indigo and I'm hoping all the hand dyed fabrics will really jump out from it. I have to wait for an order of paint sticks to arrive before I can go any further with this one. School holidays are coming up soon so hopefully I will have time to get it finished.