Go For It Girl!!

Two years ago, my friend Cleo passed away. This is the post that I wrote upon hearing of her death….

Gone too soon

A mutual friend has been given the task of cleaning out her studio, and on Monday night she presented me with this……

Back in 2011, my friend Deb and I had co-chaired our local quilt show and we made these small wallhangings to thank all of the chairmen who had worked with us. Follow THIS LINK to see the rest of the quilts.

This was the quilt that I had made for Cleo!!

I had so much fun playing with 3-dimensional flowers and a few beads as well…..

And, the little pin at the bottom right…..

….was from a future show where I made pins to thank my chairmen.

This quilt means so much to me!!!

Today, I hung it up in my studio and, as I wrote to my friend Deb, “it will be as if Cleo is right there looking over my shoulder!!”

Deb wrote back and said…. “If you’re imagining Cleo looking over your shoulder, imagine her saying “GO FOR IT!!”

Don’t we all need someone telling us to …

I hope your day is full of go…go…..go!

Fun with Mary Stori

About a month ago the talented Mary Stori visited our local guild for the meeting and then a wonderful one day workshop. I was fortunate to be able to attend both events and came away with a new love for using beads in my projects. I also enjoyed Mary’s quick sense of humor which comes thru in many of her quilts……just look at this one…..

….isn’t it cute. All of the cow outline is done with tiny beads and all of the dots in the binding are beads that she added too.

In the workshop she showed many examples of how to attach beads and also how to use the beads to accent a piece or even to be the entire design element. She was very willing to share all that she knew and yet helped us to each find our own way….

She brought many examples of her work including these beautiful leaves…..

I thought that this street scene was so cute…..

These four beauties were made from discharge dyed felt pieces. The one on the top left came home with me……

This was my favorite piece. It is so sweet and simple……

When I was getting the supplies together for this class, I found this small piece that I had played with when I first bought my felting machine. I didn’t think that much of it but thought that it might be fun to play with…..

I place a piece of tracing paper over the top and did a few drawings to get an idea of what I wanted to add….

I forgot to take photos during the further work, but here is where it stands right now…..

It has been fun to add the beads and other hand-work to the project. Maybe I will get it finished someday!!!

Last batch of flowers

This flower was one of the most fun to make. Once again, the stem was fairly short so I was looking for a flower that would move upward.

I started out by looking through this book of Origami Flower techniques …..

One of the designs was for a flower that used this basic design, but I ended up simplifying it a LOT ….

I started by cutting a strip of fabric, that was 2-1/2 inches wide and about 5 inches long. I sewed the short ends together to form a tube, turned it right side out and used a machine basting stitch to stitch along the top and bottom of each tube.

I carefully gathered the two ends and then pushed one end down into the other, causing a bowl to form. I dragged all of the threads to the back and tied them into a knot, leaving one thread on front to attach the large green bead.

When I attached these petals to the quilt top, I used seed beads to help hold the pieces in place and to also add some additional interest.

These last four flowers are basically simple beaded designs which I described in this post……

The calm after the storm

Last night was the final event related to the Quilt Show……our guild meeting and wrap up party.

Deb and I had a wonderful team of women serving on our Core Committee and then heading up each of the other committees!!!! We wanted to do something to honor them and debated long and hard about what to do.

Then, one of us mentioned making 3-dimensional flowers and the ideas started flowing. We decided to give each chairman a flower, just like an actor receives after a wonderful performance!!!

I have already shown the process that we used to dye the background fabrics…check it out here, AND, I have shown some of the beaded flowers here.

We both had ideas that we wanted to incorporate…..I was enjoying playing with beads so wanting something “blingy”, and Deb really enjoys using words on her quilts, so we decided to do both.

The words were printed on “Extravorganza” fabric.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t get all of the quilts together to take a photo but here are my portion of the completed projects…..

In the next few days, I will post pictures of the individual flowers and tell a bit about how they were made.

NOW, as for this morning……I slept wonderfully last night, with no “disaster” dreams haunting me, I woke up relaxed and refreshed, my Husband and I skipped the gym and I had biscuits and eggs for breakfast!!!! Needless to say, I am in relaxation mode……at least until 10:00am…..then I have to get back to doing tax returns, but it is SO nice to know that I can sit at my desk all day and work, AND to know that the guild has pulled off another successful show!!!

My little bit of fun

A few weeks ago I showed you the flowers that I was beading. Well, now I can show you what they were for…..

There were 6 people who were instrumental in the planning and running of the quilt show, they included four Core Committee members and Deb and myself (Co-Chairs). I had a great desire to make something that we could all wear during the show that told visitors that we were the organizers of the event.

SO….when I heard Mary Stori speak about beading a couple of months ago, she talked about using felt to stabilize the work and I got to thinking about using felt to make these badges.

The process went like this…… fuse fabric onto the felt to create the flower design, use thread to “free-motion” around the edges of all of the fabrics, attach the beads (the REALLY fun part), cut out the flowers, add the ribbons (more about that below), fuse fabric on the back, cut out the fabric, add the pin.

You know that you always manage to learn something from almost every project and here is my newest bit of knowledge…..did you know that you can use an Ink Jet Printer to print directly onto ribbon? Here is the process…..

Print out the items that you want to print on the ribbon, making sure that they will easily fit on the ribbon. I printed mine out on cardstock.

Then you take double sided tape and stick it on TOP of the words that you want to print. You stick the ribbon onto the other side of the double sided tape and run it back through your Ink Jet Printer. I also added a piece of regular tape to the top of the page to keep the ribbons from coming loose in the printer.

And…..voila…… printed ribbon……

Here are the finished products. They looked great as our core committee wore them during the show….