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I’ve been itching to make a garment. I saw the Agustina Boxy Top on my IG feed and thought it looked perfect: free download, I knew I had fabric for it in my stash and it was super simple. Ah, not so: I consider this my muslin and I had hoped it would be a “wearable muslin”. Unless you’ve sewn a pattern before, it’s always a good idea to make a muslin so you know what adjustments you’ll need to make. This was so simple that I thought I didn’t need a real muslin. Hah. This top would be best…
This week feels like a new season. I had several gigs reschedule and/or go to virtual presentation. It feels good to work again and talk to people that want me to visit! So the gauntlet has been thrown down and it is clear to me, if I want to work right now, I must go digital. Onward I go, researching and attending Zoom meetings on how to Zoom. I am the benefactor of the work of several who have gone before me that are teaching the rest of us how to teach virtually. You may have heard, AQS (American Quilter’s…
I finished, just in the nick of time! I submitted yesterday afternoon, with a wee bit of trauma, but it. is. done! I named her “Much in Common”: “The linen tablecloth and I are about the same age. We both have some worn parts and stains, and not everything is symmetrical. It was a pleasure to quilt her and retain her imperfect charm.” She is 55″ x 57″. And she is heavy – quilt + linen tablecloth + buttons + lots of thread = heavy A couple of detail shots: She was a little fussy to quilt. Her print was a…
It’s really getting down to the details this week. I worked hard all week on my grid work and am about half way through with the bead work. Next up are Prairie Points, attaching the rick-rack and then a piped binding, photos and submission. I decided to triple stitch the grid and I am glad I did. Those extra two passes took a lot of time and work but I think it was worth it. Let me show the progression and I think you’ll see why: Single stitch grid. Meh. Here you can see the double stitched grid on the…
I hold the notion that most times it’s the final 10% of your quilting decisions that make or break your quilt. I think I have way more that 10% of work left, but only a few decision areas left. All of those revolve around the border. I have gridded the border, no small task and a first for me. I did not decide until late in the game to grid the border and that is what created the problem. At that point, the center of the quilt had been heavily quilted and the unquilted border was one floppy, wavy…
This week I concluded, there is hope that I can finish this quilt in time to be able to submit to the Houston show. Hope, not a slam dunk, hope. I micro-stippled for days-on-end this week. And buried another 1.5 million knots. And just to switch tedious tasks, I finished embellishing 20 feet of rick-rack: That right there is 750 faux French Knots by machine. It took oodles of hours to figure out the right formula to make this happen. Pounding 12 wt cotton thread through polyester rick-rack, deliberately piling up the thread was fraught with peril. The final formula,…
It seems like every whole cloth quilt hits a point where the quilting gets tedious. I am at that point on my table cloth whole cloth quilt. I chose to use a 12 wt thread to outline all of the motifs. That is a super beefy thread and I felt like it needed that thickness to highlight the design. Choosing a thick thread meant that I would have to bury all my thread ends. With a thinner thread I can just take 8 – 10 tiny stitches and snip my thread, that will hold. But you can’t do that with…
Only when I started putting my post together did I realize that I am working on 4 projects at once – how’d that happen? I’m taking this time to create some new class samples in addition to working on one quilt and rediscovering another. I have this great 8′ x 8′ design walls, one of the luxuries that I planned for when we remodeled the house 4 years ago. Yet somehow I wish I had twice the design wall! What I find myself doing is putting up the project du jour on top of the previous project. Sometimes I forget…
I’ve almost finished my virus quilt (no name yet) and have moved on to my tablecloth quilt. I received a sweet reminder note from the Houston people that the due date for submissions to the Houston International Quilt Show was just 4 1/2 weeks away. Yikes – I’d better get busy! But first, my “almost finished” quilt: I still have some things to do to declare it finished, but it’s not anything that will take a long time. I decided I did not like the faux French Knots at the tips of the Prairie Points (PP). Hand stitching is…
I started thinking I did not have much to say this week but a peek at my photos for the week showed otherwise. I have not completed anything but I have worked really hard all week in bits and pieces: This drives me crazy! Working on several projects at a time gives me a mess. It didn’t stay this way for long, that’s just how I roll. I started playing with screen material. You know I love me a good sheer fabric, been working with sheers for a long time. About 10 years ago I played with screening material but…