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If there is a season for malfunction, I must be in it. I did finish my little 12″ square piece, “Jewel Box”, but not without trauma. I reached the point where I had finished the front, added backing, quilted it lightly, turned it for a clean-edge finish and had almost finished hand sewing the understitching. In the process I had poked myself with a needle, which left a bit of blood on the quilt. So I wet it to take out the blood. By now it was bedtime so I took it with me to fondle and admire in the moments…
I’ve started a new quilted piece that will be a mere 12 inches square and somehow I have already put in maybe 15 hours? There is definitely a learning curve involved. In this piece I wanted to try several things: two threads running through one needle to achieve color blending, two layers of wool batting to achieve uber puff, and using very thick threads to ramp up visual impact from afar. Given that I was going to experiment with all of these challenging techniques on one piece, I decided to work the piece with no backing-just the silk on the front,…
I love this time of year when my yard gets pared down to bare bones. I have many drought tolerant natives and when winter comes, they really show off their texture. The bark on the River Birch is just spectacular-no Photo Shopping the color here-it’s just that gorgeous. The Crepe Myrtles are almost as beautiful now, showing their lovely mottled bark, as they are blooming like crazy in the summer. All my grasses go to seed and bobble at the slightest breeze. How can you not love this? This is really spectacular! It looks aflame-it’s not backlit or anything, it…
I needed a break from all the quilting I’ve been doing, so I thought I would tackle this super simple cape from Butterick (#5819). The cape is unlined and the edges are unfinished, perfect for the quirky reversible boiled wool/lace fabric in my inventory. There are only 4 seams and 3 pattern pieces so I thought this would be a 3 hr romp, max. Ah, but my romps are never romps, they always get complicated, sigh. I ended up cramming this 3 hour project into 12 hours. If you would like to make this charming cape and stretch it out into a 12-hr+ project,…
SewCalGal has generously provided an excellent year-long Free Motion Quilting Challenge to increase and better our free motion quilting skills. In accordance with the challenge requirements, I am publishing my summary of the year: In January Frances Moore challenged us to do a leaf meander motif. I chose to use Wonderfil “Accent” thread, a 12 wt rayon that gave an almost hand embroidered look. February’s tutorial was given by Diane Gaudynski who taught us how to do beautiful feathers. I created a postcard and put the feathers upon that. In March we studied under Ann Fahl and I honestly forgot what…
December’s Free Motion Quilting Challenge from SewCalGal was provided by Patsy Thompson. Patsy encouraged us to have fun free motion quilting borders. So I created this 22″ piece with a center medallion and 5 borders for the challenge. I used cotton sateen, wool batting and a variety of threads. I marked the feather spine, center medallion circles and the squares-the rest was unmarked. This was a fun one to do and I pretty much did what came to mind. I do see that the second border in from the edge would have benefited from a darker thread. I actually kind of…
I’ve started on a new project and I’m in the Honeymoon Phase where nothing has gone wrong yet. So I’m sewing up a storm before my boys arrive for Christmas. As a result, I’ve got more tips: A BETTER LAMP Maybe it’s a bit pathetic that I am so excited about this, but I happened to be shopping in Office Depot for a few things for my office when I saw it (hallelujah chorus)…my wonderful old LED magnifier light! It was like a lost friend found. My old one bit the dust and it took me awhile to realize that…
I’ve been in my sewing room a lot this week and as I worked, I came upon three handy tips that I thought I would share. BASTING WITH WATER SOLUBLE THREAD: I am beginning a new quilt and I decided to machine baste it together using water soluble thread top and bottom-that way I don’t have to deal with those pesky safety pins. Now I did this years ago and it was NOT a success:No matter how many times I wash this, the pin holes and line will not come out. That is probably because this is silk dupioni (forehead slap!) and silk…
I am constantly on a quest to improve my “studio”. I recently reorganized my thread and I really like the new system.Here’s what I started with and it worked pretty well actually. I kept my threads in zip lock baggies by type, and then kept those in this cubby hole system. The only thing that really bugged me about it was that it was visually messy. (There was also a bunch of thread on twirling spindles out of sight of the photo).A few trips to discount and I found these to be the perfect solution. I labeled each drawer and…