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My Wayne Thiebaud slice quilt is done except for some final quilting and a hanging sleeve. My group met last night for the reveal-what a thrill! I forgot my camera and phone so no photos of the assembled quilt-ugh. It will show in 2 weeks and I will have photos then. My Slice Mates made me feel quite humble-I think the final assembled quilt is fabulous. I am much more pleased with what I learned than I am with my slice.I will go back and quilt in the major elements of the design to nail them to the backing, but I wanted to wait…
I temporarily abandoned my thread shredding adventure with Saw Tooth Star to work on a slice quilt that is due, gasp, next week. One of the art groups I am a part of, Quartz, is taking a Wayne Thiebaud painting (with permission) and a group of 4 of us is each doing a slice (section) of the quilt.This is the photo I am working from. I am working in an entirely different manner than any other piece I’ve done. I am going to “pillowcase” it instead of doing the traditional binding. There will be no border or binding, just a knife…
I’m writing from the depths of thread shred hell and have accumulated what I call “thread shred cred(entials)”. Right after my last post on how well my work with metallic wrapped silk thread was going, it started shredding. At that point I had put in at least 4 shred-free hours when all of a sudden the wheels fell off and I was shredding thread every 4 inches. How could that happen? It was sudden and dramatic. I have spent well over 20 hours meticulously working through this and still don’t have a solid answer. I even went to the Ultimate…
Just when I thought I had my design decisions made and I was ready for that delightful phase of feathering up the surface of the quilt, I decided I didn’t like my thread choice after all. Look:I love Aurifil 28 wt cotton thread, but I think in this case it gives the motif a “ghosty” look from afar, an almost spider webby look. I know some people like that look because I see it all the time on competition quilts that have ribboned. It’s just not my particular style. Also, it became a strong design element which competed with the…
My little 3-block Saw Tooth Star hanging is done! I’ve been waiting to put up a post, waiting to get my camera back from repair. It’s going to be a few more days, so this post has some pretty poor photos-Duct Tape Nikon and my i-phone are all I have.I finished my Saw Tooth Star 3-block hanging as a study for my larger piece. I’m glad I did the little study as I learned a lot from my choices on this one. I do like the finished product, but I see things I would have changed-I’ll incorporate this learning curve in…
Am I the only one? Why is it impossible for the Lyon’s to put on a good Christmas display? As an example, here’s the tree: Yes, I am aware it does not look like a tree-it’s one third of a pre-lighted tree. Here is the yearly drill: Stuff the tree through the tiny little munchkin door of the attic-it’s kind of like giving birth. Plug in the pre-lighted tree to see how many lights have gone out since last year. Load it into the car to have the store fix the lights. Pick up the tree and begin decorating. All of…
It’s been a long time since I have done precision piecing! This has been increasingly obvious as I have worked through my Saw Tooth Star piece. Saw Tooth Star-how hard can that be? It’s one of the easiest blocks to piece! I’ve been making new blocks for my Saw Tooth Star because I’m not happy with some of my really poorly pieced old ones-many were misshapen and, I wanted to refine my color choices a bit too. So now I have TWENTY FOUR orphan blocks, just waiting to be used….where?So here’s my confession: it is taking me 80 minutes to…
After seeing Jan Soules’ work in last week’s River City show, I was inspired to retrieve these colorful Saw Tooth Star blocks from my dusty UFO pile. I pieced these oh-so-imperfect blocks about 5 years ago. They are um, widely varied in color shall we say, and a difficult mix to make into something cohesive. I took them with me to a recent meeting of a great group I am a part of: “Sisters In Stitches” ( SIS). My SIS friends looked at them and Helen Hardwick suggested the striped surround for the blocks and my friend Laura Rylander suggested the chalky lavender…
I love going to quilt shows! The River City Quilt Guild’s show was this weekend-I go every year and I think this is the best show they’ve ever done. Jan Soules was the featured quilter and there must have been 30 pieces of Jan’s work in the show. Jan has won many Best of Shows, Best Use of Color, etc and many of her quilts have hung in international shows throughout the country. Jan masterfully uses color, value, design and unusual fabrics. This quilt, “Sunrise, Sunset”, quilted by Deb Lopez, is in the American Quilting Society’s Annual Engagement Calendar for 2012. Talk about moving the…
Okay, I’m done! I figure there were over 7 hours of ripping on this one. One Big Take-Away: Each design decision takes on great impact in such a small piece. The margin of error was tiny-one bad thread color, one little motif decision and the entire piece was diminished. I am NOT a perfectionist! Yet I spent a lot of time removing stitches because the wrong thread or motif just shouted on this piece. The piece is 15″ square-it’s a study for a larger piece I want to make.I started to “wing it” on the parallel lines on the outside of the border and had…