A special congratulations to a couple of my customers that won ribbons at the Mid Valley Quilt Guild show. I received an email from a friend this morning that attended the show yesterday. She said Gail’s log cabin quilt was her favorite in the entire show!
This is Gail’s quilt.
This one, Gloria’s original design, was also exhibited at Road to California. The cranes were based on her own photos with the flying geese background in color gradations. Stunning.
Here is the second time around with appliqué on the long arm.
First I quilted the entire background with feathers and then a bit of curved cross hatching in the darker on point squares. Leaving everything mounted on the frame I added my appliqué. I prepared my appliqué fabric with misty fuse then traced the motifs onto the fabric and cut out at least an inch or so larger than the appliqué and lay this on the quilt in its position.
Here you see the freezer paper shape still on the appliqué. The next photo shows a stem pinned onto the quilt. You should be able to see my tracing marks. I then stitch on the lines and cut away the excess fabric when finished. I did increase my stitches per inch to 14 and you could go to 16.
I found this to be a less stress way of doing appliqué and simply having a fun play day. I do enjoy how the background quilting goes right behind the appliqué.
Here I am with my quilt…..all bound, labeled and finished!
Every year after the Christmas quilting rush is over I try to clean up an old project or tame my scraps. This year it is an old craft project that began in the early 90′s when I spotted a wood working magazine with a nutcracker fireplace screen. Had to have it so I shipped off the pattern to my father who was a wood worker. His idea of wood working was more along the lines of fine furniture but he graciously broke his rules and cut them out for me. Thanks, Dad.
I was in charge of painting and embellishments. The problem, I am a lousy painter so they hung around for years semi started. Then one day my “other mother”, Flora Reid, a woman near and dear to my heart and an artist, stopped by for a visit. I shamelessly asked her to paint them for me. No hurry I said, what’s a few more years at this point….needless to say they were back a couple months later and that was a couple years ago. Finally finished! I love the faces, each a bit different. They do still need braces to stand up, one last little chore to be finished up this week.
Flora, thank you so much. I will have a couple shipped off to you!
This week I have decided to clean out the guest room closet. It is one of those closets that is the repository for things you don’t know what to do with or “need” to save in case you figure out a use for them. In my case it is also where I store old quilting magazines. Fortunately, I quit doing that years ago but still have about 10 magazine racks to sort through. Now I sort and rip out an idea or piece that inspires me and pitch the rest within a year.
What fascinated me with this undertaking was what still appealed to me. The OLD magazines. Not the patterns but the ads, fabric at $4.50 a yard. Muslin so cheap I couldn’t believe it. The columns written by Jean Ray Laurey and Jeffery Gutchenson (I may have spelled those wrong). To this day they are thought provoking. Do any of you remember them? No links to websites or email addresses. Send a self addressed stamped envelope……Are you kidding?
Here is a cover from 1980. Do you recognize her?
I have many more to go through but the good news is, I also found a quilt top…..and a bag of exercise projects from a workshop with Nancy Crow in1994. So many fun things and I haven’t gotten to the entire closet yet.
Just finished the Mary’s River Quilt Guild raffle quilt for 2013. Tickets will be on sale in January. It’s first showing will be at the Oregon Gardens quilt show in late January.
I have been wrestling with ways to do appliqué now that my eyes don’t like the hand work anymore. Neither do my hands for that matter. I am not fond of clear thread and a zig zag stitch so I’ve been trying different ways to accomplish appliqué on the Longarm.
The method of edge stitching was introduced about a year or more ago by JoAnn Blade called Appliqué the Statler Way. I have modified her technique by quilting the background first then applying the appliqué all freehand.
I started with leaf shapes I drew on freezer paper, iron those to their chosen fabrics and draw around it with chalk. This is what it looks like sitting on the quilted background with the freezer paper on it.
Now, remove the freezer paper and quilt on the lines
Next, very carefully cut away the excess fabric right along the stitched line. Very carefully!
I used appliqué scissors and small curved at the end pointy scissors. If you cut through your stitching……add another leaf.
The only problem is the raw edges do want to fray a bit. But, they are leaves so that is okay with me. Using fusible web would alleviate that issue.
This photo shows part of the leaf cut away.
Here is the finished quilt. And we are off to start the next one.
I broke down and upgraded to iPad 3 a couple months ago. I Live it and Tim is thrilled to inherit version 1 iPad. Today’s chore is to figure out how to post with my WordPress ap. First we try to insert a picture….
Then
I am now looking at a bunch of code….not the picture but I am betting those happiness engineers at WordPress know what they are doing.
My iPad is my favorite “tool” so I am bound and determined to make this work! Going to hit the publish button now.
All the quilts that come my way are beautiful but sometimes something very unique walks in the door. This one is a Java Batik, one piece of fabric, about 42″ x 82″. Fabulous print, isn’t it? Quilting was kept simple with outlining and echoing. No sense competing with fabric.
And this quilt is about the largest one I have ever quilted. 122″ square.
Those solid alternate blocks are 24″ across. Took a bit of rolling back and forth to get them quilted. I can’t quite reach that far!
Busy, busy, busy…..quilts, gardening activities, drag races, boot camp workouts (that is an entire other blog post but suffice it to say, its just what it sounds like). Fortunately I’ve never met a quilt I didn’t like and here is a slide show of the ones I have recently quilted for my customers.
Written
on March 21, 2013