Working with sheers and a new machine!

 

Yes, my Grandson (and his parents) came for the weekend!

I won’t post full photos of Little Man but look at those dimples? I’m a first-time Gramma so indulge me. They are just so stinkin cute at this age. He is starting to pontificate just a little bit. His Dad did that….still does:-)

And my youngest son from Tucson came for the weekend too! We had him for 3 days, Little Man and his parents for one. Such is life for busy parents. It filled my Mommy heart to have my whole family here. Here is the frig post-apocalypse visit:

I may be the only person in the world who takes frig photos…. It just amazes me what the frig looks like before and after a visit. I take care to create heat-and-eat, healthy meals. Mommy phrase: “You won’t get fat eating my food. If you gain while visiting me you just ate too much”! Doesn’t that sound very Gramma-like? True, dat.

I received some welcome encouragement this week from my Cohorts at Creative Spark where my on demand course resides. I now have TWO courses that I am developing curriculum and samples for. The first will be a class using free motion quilting and sheers, a super fun romp of a project. I have always loved sheers and started incorporating them into my quilting early-century. My students have been asking for more classes and I needed to get on it. I am always on the look out for fun, easy ways to up your free motion quilting game. Both of these will fit the bill.

I have lots of sheers. In fact I would guess I have about 20 pounds of commercial sheer fabric:

And that’s not all! I went through a hand dyed silk organza phase and produced this:

There is probably about 32 hand dyed half yards of silk organza there. The colors are divine! I am thinking about dyeing more, just love the results. I used my own hand-dyes in this piece which I showed last week:

I did not realize the impact those hand-dyes made until I began to work with commercially dyed fabrics. But my students will probably not have access to hand-dyed silk organza so I needed to build the class and samples around commercial fabric.

It was a promising start, but I ended up here:

I didn’t like the splotchy look and the colors were just not doing it for me. So I ripped some of it out:

I like this much better. Now, on to adding foliage at the bottom:

This is my palette. I’ve just begun to lay down the foliage at the bottom, then I will stitch it down. I’m developing some short cuts and easier ways to do all of this. It is so fun to play with these pieces! The free motion quilting is not picky, so less-than-skillful quilting will be fine on this type of piece. In fact, I think a little bit of rickety quilting enhances this look!

I have my own learning curve: I love that Orange Peel background, but it took me 2 hrs to mark and quilt enough for an 12 x 16″ piece! Not good for class. So I will make several class samples with different backgrounds to show the effect of each.

But I won’t be done then – I’ll be adding beads by machine! And some bits and pieces of lace and such may end up there too. Not sure.

In other news, this just came home with me:

A friend sold it to me, as she was not using it. I can’t wait to play with it! I saw a Dear Jane sashiko’d on Insta!! And besides, you know, I needed another machine….

I’ll link up with:

Nina-Marie’s Off the Wall Friday
and
Finished or Not Friday