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The applique/trapunto project continues to grow and ask me for more, not letting the simple or “git er done” to prevail. So here’s what she asked me to do this week: I wanted to feather that border, it needed something that justified the central block: Ah, she asked for feathers, but not just regular feathers. She asked for something a little different. I thought it might be cool to do those feathers in red: Meh. How about if I put a vein in each feather? That was a hard “no”! How about a lighter blue? Hmm, maybe a little…
I completed nothing this week except creating and editing teaching videos to support my 3 hour Straight Line Ruler Work class. Ruler work on a domestic is pretty difficult to show live. You kinda need 3 hands and it’s hard to not block the camera with your hands. Other teachers will not be surprised with this statistic: it took 10 hrs to tape and edit 7 videos with a total play time of 31 minutes. They will debut this Saturday at an online class and I suspect I will skip some of what I’ve recorded. One of the great…
This was a fun one! My Grandson is learning his alphabet and one of my students, Traci, practiced her free motion quilting by making quilted letters for her Grandson. I totally, 100% got the idea from Traci; thank you! I started out by just using batting between two layers of fabric, but I thought that might be a little floppy. I grabbed some Fast2Fuse from my stash for the middle layer instead. Fast2Fuse was designed for mailable postcards and is a 2-sided stiff fusible, perfect for the letters! This is a documentary, not a tutorial! There are probably better…
It’s been a super busy week but there are not that many photos to share. My son prefers that no photos of children be posted online; you know how people can do bad things with them. But I do have a few photos to share. We had the most wonderful get together; it was a short 2 days, but oh so fun! This was baby M’s first longer car trip, 2 hours. She did well in the car and seemed to thrive here at the house too. She truly is an adorable girl, wish I could show you! Baby hands…
What a faaaaaantastic week I’ve had (if you go Th to Th)! I had 18 talented, eager, prepared, well equipped and enthusiastic students for a 2-day Seminar at Meissner Sewing‘s main location in Sacramento. I billed it as a beginner’s class, but about half of the students had experience, several of them quite talented already. That was a challenge and it all worked out beautifully. It is such a joy to teach a class like this, when everyone is excited! I hope you can see that joy on their faces. I seem to always forget to take as many…
NOTE: I won’t have a newsletter this week; I just realized there is no way I can do it; I will be teaching all day Fri and Sat. Sorry! I had a chance to work on my applique/trapunto piece this week and all I want to do is quilt it! I chose a luscious navy blue dupioni for the border, a striped silk for the insert and a traditional ecru fabric for the half square triangles. It came together beautifully: I chose to do a “bouncing banana” fill around the applique. My other choices were micro stipple or bubble.…
It has been a week of variety: a guild visit, hand applique/trapunto and beginning to prep student kits for Houston. My visit to the Amador Valley Quilters was so much fun! I stayed with my friend Jeanne and we solved all of the world’s problems over the kitchen table. The guild meets in Pleasanton, CA and what a beautiful city! They are in a unique location that delivers cool and breezy nights; such a delight! I walked Jeanne’s neighborhood in the wee hours so I don’t have any photos of the beauty but I did enjoy the fresh flowers…
This is an update to my previous post about air erasable pens. The project I am working on has a variety of silks, some of which have unstable dyes. Wetting that quilt is out of the question. My only choice was an air erasable marker. I won’t go into why other methods would not work on this project, why the Blue Line Eraser was not an option, etc. Trust me, air erasable was the only viable option. I’ll be inserting random shots of the project I’m working on, just for grins: My focus for the previous post was the…
It was a huge change to move the Pacific Int’l Quilt Festival to July, and it may take a while for that to catch on. The show no longer fills the center, but it seems like it was about the same size as last year. I do think it was an especially good show; the level of talent seemed to be higher. Maybe that’s just me. I do have “rules” for what I post or don’t post: I don’t post quilts that I have posted before, I usually don’t take photos of quilts in the winner’s circle as there…
NOTE: I have an update to my thoughts on air erasable pens here. I’ve been slogging away on my blue silk quilt. My fills will all be grid-based designs, which means they must be marked. I looked at the previously stitched grid (wrote about it here) in better light and liked it after all! I decided to keep it. I am currently working clamshells: Oh. So. Tedious to mark. The quilt top is all silk with cotton backing and wool batting. There are known silk bleeders in the mix. I cannot ever wet this quilt. It is glooooorious in…