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….

I’m in the Garden of Beading!!!

A couple of months ago I wrote about hearing a talk by Mary Stori and how I was encouraged by her use of beads.

Well, the very next day, I hit Hobby Lobby and Michael’s and found that their beads were on sale!!!! I picked up a few small tubes at HL…….

but hit the Mother-Lode in Michaels…..

This wonderful caddy held THIRTY different colors of seed beads as well as other larger beads.

I could just see me opening these caddies and dumping all of the beads out so I moved them into individual small bags. Pretty cool, huh…….

So the next questions was “what was I going to bead”?……

Well, it’s a surprise so I cant tell you!!!!

But, here is a sneak preview of my current project………………..

I am SO excited about how it is looking……stay tuned!!!!

A fun morning with Mary Stori

On Tuesday morning, I traveled to the Lake Oconee Quilter’s Guild meeting to hear a talk by Mary Stori. She is a wonderful writer and speaker and provided a fun morning…..
Her talk was entitled “Let It Shine” and in less than 45 minutes, she had me hooked on the idea of using beads on my quilts. She told us that the two secrets to beading are spacing and stabilizing, and then she proceeded to show many examples of how to accomplish these tasks.
She encouraged us to make sure that the beads were well integrated into the quilt….either as the focal design or as embellishments designed to enhance the project. She also encouraged us to use different types and sizes of beads to bring more texture to the project.
These are some of my favorite quilts that she showed……
You may need to click on this photo to be able to actually see the beads, but they are scattered carefully over this simple trapunto quilt and just add SO much to the design….. This quilt is called “Fish Sticks” and is WONDERFUL!!!!!
This little bead and button garden was so cute……

Finally, this parrot really captured my imagination……Now, I have never tried beading before and never really thought that I wanted to, but I am starting to re-think that philosophy. We are going to be in China for 5 weeks this year and I have been trying to figure out what I could take to work on, but now I am thinking about creating a quilt top with simple fused flower shapes and taking beads to embellish it with. Who knows, I might even find a good bead source while I am there.
SO, it seems that driving to this talk was a good CHOICE for the first Tuesday of 2011!!!!!