A VERY different quilt

This week I finished up a small project that had been in my mind for a few weeks, and one which is a very different style for me.

Back in August, my friend Deb H. and I spent a day doing glue resist dyeing. Here is the original post. One of the pieces that I created was a simple vase of flowers and I knew almost immediately what I wanted to do with it.

The first step was to add some embroidery to the background. I used examples from a fairly recent article in Quilting Arts Magazine. The only difference was that the examples there used nice quality variegated threads and all I had were some cheap ones that I had bought some time back. But, I persevered and came up with a fairly nice background.

I felt that the vase and flowers needed to be highlighted too, so I trapuntoed them with 2 extra layers of batting.

I am NOT a paisley person, but this old fabric from my stash called to me and so I succumbed and used it as the final border.

The quilting was fairly straight forward, and I was happy to complete the quilt so quickly.

I took it to my local charity bee and, while showing them the finished product, realized that I didn’t like it because several of the threads were too light in color and the detracted from the background. So, while we were looking at another member’s quilt where she had painted many of the designs, I thought about using fabric pens and coloring over the “too bright” threads.

Voila …..I like it MUCH better now.

Escada Azul

Wow, I just had a very fun 3 day weekend….it is sad to see it past!!! On Friday, I mailed my Sunflower quilt to the East Cobb Quilt Guild show in Atlanta, where it will be judged next Monday and then hung the following Thursday. I am looking forward to seeing it hanging in this wonderful show.

On Saturday, Sunday and Monday, I worked on several different projects and truly enjoyed spending long hours in my studio.

The prize of the weekend was finishing the blue stair quilt that I showed a couple of posts back. It is now named “Escada Azul” (Blue Stairs)……

Here is the photo that the quilt was based on……

As with most of my pieces, I learned a lot about myself!! I ended up doing a lot of applique to set the piece together and found that I enjoyed the hand work. I also had one piece that didn’t l0ok right but I had decided that it was “good enough”. I thought about it during the night and went in first thing Monday morning and ripped the piece out and re-did it, being much happier with the result.

I also quilted a wallhanging for a friend who is in a time crunch trying to get her booth ready for the upcoming Atlanta show. I still find it nerve racking to quilt for another quilter….someone who KNOWS what it is supposed to look like!!!

Oh well, so much for the Holiday….now it is on to Accounting work!!!

Success is SWEET!!!

Click on the photo for a larger picture that shows the quilting better.

I am so excited to report that the blue lines all came out and that the quilt is now finished!!!!

After the first soaking in water, the lines were still showing in the outer border. This was because I didn’t just follow the lines when quilting that part, but did a “Greek Key” design using the lines as a placement guide, so many of the actual lines were not quilted on.

SO, I used an ENTIRE bottle of “Shout” and heavily sprayed the outside border and let it sit for about 2 hours. I then filled the bath up with water again, adding Oxi-Clean and clothes soap. The quilt soaked in this solution for about 18 hours.

Then yesterday, I put the quilt in the washer and rinsed it a few times and then dried it in a HOT dryer.

I am so pleased with how it turned out and also with the quilting. I will NEVER be afraid to quilt a big quilt on my sewing machine again!!!

Thanks for reading and for the well wishes that the lines would disappear.

Casa Amarela

A few weeks ago I ranted about a project that I was scared to start because I didn’t know if I was capable of finishing it.

It was a quilt based on this photo that was taken when I was in Porto, Portugal back in May……

I knew that I wanted to replicate the stairs and houses, but was frightened to start it!!!!!

I started out by printing the photo in an 8×10 format, using Black and White printing, on regular computer paper. I then used a ruler and fine point Sharpie to draw the major lines on the drawing. If the Sharpie is fairly new, the ink will soak thru the paper so that you can see it easily from the back side. I re-traced those lines on the back, giving me a reverse pattern.

I then printed out the reversed version of the line drawing using the poster function which allows the one page to be printed out onto 4 pages….2 across and 2 down. Finally, I printed the photo itself out onto four pages as well….of course I ran out of toner mid photo!!!

I began working with the fabrics by dividing the picture into straight-line sections and tracing them onto Golden Threads paper. I paper pieced each section and then sewed them all together. A couple of the seams were hand sewn to help me get the parts lined up properly.

At this point, I decided that I wasn’t happy with the piece, but couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. So, I took it to my Charity Bee the next week and asked for their suggestions.

They immediately said……add the details from the photo and add some shading to the stairs!!! Simple little changes, but they definitely did the trick!!!!

I was nervous about using gray markers on the piece to shade it, but once I finally got my courage up, it made a HUGE difference. I ended up adding shading to almost every part of the picture.

The quilting was fun, although I had to take several lines out and re-do them because they didn’t match with the perspective of the quilt.

Here is the final version, named “Casa Amarela”, which stands for “Yellow House” in Portuguese.

Sunflowers in the Rust

Well, I can happily report that I have finished the rust piece that I have been working on for the past couple of weeks. I wanted to enter it in an Atlanta show and the deadline was today, so I was working down to the wire.

In doing some practice work (see previous post), I realized that I was going to have to do some thread work on the piece, so I started out by backing it with a very lightweight fusible interfacing.

I used Golden Threads tracing paper to draw the sunflowers…..wasn’t game to try to freehand them with thread.

I then sewed around the paper design.

…..and removed the paper.

I did the same thing with the leaves, and then sewed around the designs 2, 3 or 4 times, depending on how heavy I wanted the lines to be.

As I did the thread work, the fabric started to draw up slightly, making the fabric look wrinkled in the flowers, so I decided to trapunto the flowers and ended up adding extra batting to all of the elements, including the grass at the bottom.

I am happy with the borders on the piece as the first one on the right and bottom used fabrics that I had stamped.

Final step was to baste and quilt the piece. All of the rust colored lines were quilted just following the design of the flowers. Then I had to decide what to do to the background. I started with even lines at the top, but moved into curvy lines in the interior of the piece. The main reason that I did this was because it was easier to do, but, in retrospect, I really like the way it looks.

I decided to face the quilt rather than bind it.

It is always a good feeling to finish a piece…..now on to the next 4 or 5 that are in my mind!!!!