On Tuesday morning, I went to the meeting of the Lake Oconee Quilter’s Guild and heard a wonderful talk and saw a fantastic trunk show by Margie Engel. …check out her website.

She is one of those lovely quilters who is willing to tell you everything she knows, show you everything that she has made (good and not-so-good) and encourages you to touch any of her quilts!!!!

She has written one book (a second will be out soon)  called “Bodacious Applique ala carte”

In this book she provides simple ways to do hand applique, with her basic premise being the appliqueing of large shapes and then using paints, colored pencils and inks to fill in the details.   She would also add some thread work details.  Here are two quilts that used this process ….

She also talked about things to do with a really large print or a pre-printed piece.  Her main points were to really look at the fabric before you cut it up and even suggested photographing or photocopying the fabric and printing out lots of copies to cut up first.  Here are a couple of examples……

In the above quilt, the turtle block toward the middle/left of the quilt was another fabric and was too bright for the quilt.  SO, Margie used colored pencils to shade areas and darken the overall fabric.    She also wanted to continue  the dolphin theme on the left side of the quilt, so she used a grey fabric and cut out another dolphin there.

She spoke about using Tsukiniko Inks, reminding us that they were completely washable until heat set.  SO, if you dont like what you have done, you can wash it out and start over!!!

She also showed  some work with Prisma Color Premier pencils where she used the pencil to emphasize a particular pattern in a fabric.  She commented on these pencils that they were not color fast, but that you could paint a thin film of thinned matte gel medium over the top and that it would then be permanent.

The final quilt that she showed was a wonderful example of mixed techniques as it included trapunto, yo-yo’s, and dimensional applique……

My favorite quilt was this one…..

It was an excellent example of working with a piece with large designs and also, it was perfectly embellished, both with beads and threads…..

One tip that I liked was  a method of using Angelina fibers.  Margie said to spread out the fibers, iron them into a sheet, place on top of the fabric and then free-motion quilt over them.

The best tip that I found from the morning was for applique, particularly when you are adding beads or thread work.  Margie applique’s the piece to a piece of black felt, does all of the embellishment work, cuts out the shape leaving a tiny sliver of black felt and then appliques the whole piece to her top.  She says that this helps to stabilize the piece so that it will hold up to the extra weight from the embellishments.  PLUS, it provides a fantastic outline to the applique!!!!

Needless to say, I had a WONDERFUL morning!!!!!