October 21st, 2017
There’s nothing quite as invigorating as beginning a new quit project. I’ve had the center part of this quilt in my head for a few months now, but couldn’t allow myself to begin working on it until I had finished up some other work. Now I can really plow into this! I started by cutting out applique shapes with my Sizzix Big Shot:
(This was early on…I cut a WHOLE lot more than this, but it went very quickly using a steel rule die.) My background fabrics were the hand dyed fabrics I dyed recently. Here are my 3 center panels once they’d been backed with a lightweight interfacing and cut to size:
(For what it’s worth, I always fuse a lightweight interfacing onto the back of any fabric I’m going to embroider, but cotton sateen is a good fabric to ALWAYS fuse to lightweight stabilizer, even when you’re not going to embroider it. It’s a twill fabric and can be a bit of a “shape-shifter,” if you know what I mean. Once you back it with interfacing, it will not change shapes on you.)
Next up, I fired up the old embroidery machines and started many, many hoopings of machine embroidery applique. You can see one of the panels in the next shot as I’m still adding to it:
This first panel has jade swags and dark blue flowers. It’s my favorite one. This second panel has turquoise swags and purply/blue flowers. I’m not as in love with this one:
I can’t believe I got this far already, but I’ve finished the MEA on the first 2 panels!! Here is a shot of them next to one another on my design wall:
The Dijon mustard fabric in between them is in the “auditioning phase”…not sure that is a “go” or not just yet. The third panel will also have jade swags and dark blue flowers. I won’t be able to work on this again for a week, but I’m feeling totally “juiced up” by how far I’ve gotten so far. Here’s a closer up shot that is very off-kilter:
Filed under
Fabric Dyeing, Machine Embroidered Applique, Sizzix.
September 25th, 2017
I had to turn in my quilt today, so all work on it has ceased, at least for now. It’s 61 in x 61 in and I love the bold color combinations and also love the quilting. There is one border section that actually isn’t quite finished yet, and I couldn’t begin work on it or it would really look odd. I am hoping that I will find the time to go back in and finish what I want to do later. Here are some closeup shots:
This next photo shows where I couldn’t finish. I want to add a single row of pearls in the tapered arc-shaped channel that abuts the blue applique shapes in that red border zone. I estimate that the quilting, plus all the thread burying, will take at least another 20 hours of work and I just ran out of time.
Quilting this one really drove home to me how important color is. Having such a close view of that center section, which is a hand-dyed cotton sateen, was thrilling for all the hundreds of hours I worked on it. I need to use my hand dyed fabrics more.
I’m excited to work on some other projects for awhile!
Filed under
Free Motion Quilting, Machine Embroidered Applique, ruler work on a HDSM.
August 6th, 2017
I made this table runner last week. It is actually made from a border design I made about a year ago and I’ve meant to adapt it into a table runner all these months but never got around to it. It’s a machine embroidery applique design and it’s nice because it takes about 35 minutes to stitch each fern so you can get a fair amount of other sewing work done while it’s stitching out. I’m not sure that the layout is quite right, though. I normally verify that my applique shape placement is aesthetically pleasing by stitching a mock-up of the placement outlines of applique shapes onto muslin, but I skipped that step. This is another one of those “don’t do it” moments when you have to painfully re-learn that there’s a good reason for most of one’s “double-checking” routines! I am in the process of making a revised version of this with a slight variation in the placement of the ferns. I’ll post a side-by-side comparison in a couple weeks once it’s done.
This was very fun to quilt and that part was very quick. I used my PTD12 arc ruler to do the ruler work framing. The fill-in is featherettes and the goal is to completely “use up” the available space within the ruler work framework. The photos below show my strategy for doing this. In this next shot, you can see that I have horizontal/vertical lines denoting my center point and axes. Here is the first “quadrant” of the featherette being stitched using those guidelines:
…and here the first “quadrant” of the featherette has been stitched and I’m moving on the the adjacent “quadrant” of the featherette:
Here’s an example of the center featherette once it’s been stitched:
The space between the ruler work design and the fern appliques is filled by stitching plumes that stretch from the ruler work to just next to the applique shapes. Even though these plumes keep changing size/proportion, it works visually and you “believe” the end design:
I use that same “bump-back” method to fill the 1/2 inch channel by the edges of the table runner with a long, skinny featherette:
These featherettes are all made using the bump-back feather method. If you’re interested in how to create featherettes, I wrote a nice blog post explaining it awhile back and you can find it by clicking here. Alternately, you can learn about how to quilt featherettes in my Craftsy class. We are now selling the DVD for my Craftsy class called “Ultimate Free Motion Feathers:”
…and you can find it in our online store by clicking here. There’s a lot of feather info on this DVD that is not on any of my Free Motion Fun With Feathers DVD, so it’s worth it to check it out.
Filed under
Craftsy!, Free Motion Quilting, Machine Embroidered Applique, ruler work on a HDSM.
