Susan Brubaker Knapp Archives – Quilts and Other Stuff from Frances

Yesterday, I was privileged to take another class from Susan Knapp……this time it was all about Thread Sketching. As with the photo class, I learned much and truly enjoyed the day.

The goal of this class was to prepare and thread paint a dragonfly.

First step was to assemble the pattern…..

Then we traced the wings onto our backing fabric and added fused body shapes cut from our favorite fabrics…..

We pinned the top to a piece of interfacing and pulled out the threads…..Susan suggests using a 50 or 60 weight cotton thread, but also encouraged us to use what we had on hand……

and started sewing……

after the majority of the thread painting was done, we went back in and added the tiny “window panes” of the wings.

Here is my finished project……

I particularly like the hairy legs!!!

Once again, Susan did a wonderful job of teaching, encouraging and creatively helping us to solve our problems.

I LOVE the intent looks of everyone’s faces!!!!

This is her dragonfly……

I desperately wanted to keep examining it before I would sew, but instead tried to make the thread painting truly my own!!

When I got home I started looking at photos with idea of trying to thread paint one of them. This is the one that I keep coming back to……

It has lots of texture and easily distinguishable shadings. Maybe, just maybe I will attempt this sometime in the not to distant future!!!!

Stay tuned………

Today I spent a day at my local quilt shop taking a class with the famous Susan Brubaker Knapp. Check out her website here or her blog here…..

You have probably seen some of her wonderful thread paintings in many of the popular quilting magazines and today I had the privilege of sitting under her teaching!!!

The class was called “Start with a Photo” and it took us through the process of using a photo as the inspiration and then turning it into a quilt. She provided a photo and pattern of a red barn……

The first step was to use a sharpie to draw the design onto a medium weight upholstery clear vinyl. This is the pattern that we used for the rest of the day.

We then prepared fusible web sections, selected fabrics and fused the piece together. The full piece was placed on a piece of sew-in interfacing and the FUN BEGAN…..

We took various threads and started to add details with machined threadwork. Most of the threads were 40 weight, but many of us used whatever we happened to have. I particularly enjoyed using some variegated threads in the grass areas.

Here is my piece at the end of the day……

Obviously I have a way to go before it will be finished!!!!

Now, on to the REAL quilts of the day. Here are some of the quilts that Susan brought to inspire us……

I loved these spools when I saw them in a magazine……

This is a small quilt (maybe 8×6) and Susan told us that there are only four different pieces of fabric in it….the rest is done with THREAD……

In this one, the slices were done separately, a back was sewn on, they were turned and then appliqued to the top. The result is that they have a LOT of wonderful dimension……