August 5th, 2008
This post is gonna be all over the place! First, I started a new leaf quilt. These pictures are from only 1 block of the quilt. I always find myself intrigued by the shape of dandelion leaves as I’m cutting grass, so I finally decided to play around with that shape on a quilt. Here was my cut out leaf just sitting on piece of fabric. The leaf is about 2 1/2-3 feet long:
(Actually, I added the inner light green area after I’d shown the original to my husband and he said, “Oh, so you’re making a sting-ray quilt!”) Unfortunately, after I showed him what’s in the picture above, he said “Oh, so now you’re making a 2-tone sting-ray quilt!” After that, I knew I needed to work harder on this, so I cut out the leaf veins and fused it to the background fabric:
(sorry about the chopped off portions, but the details aren’t visible if I shoot the whole block at once). Next, I satin stitched around the edges of the inner green portion with a sea foam green thread:
…and then I switched thread colors and satin-stitched around the entire leaf with dark green thread:
With what’s been done so far, it’s already beginning to take on some interesting texture. Next, I need to do some free motion design work inside each of those green zones-I’m still thinking over what I should do there.
I started another quilt, but I think it’s about to go on a detour from my original plans! This one began with these small blocks:
Each of the blocks is different, and I decided to make them more “definitive” by adding a larger border of a bold color around each block. Here they are arranged on my design wall:
Sometimes, I just feel a need to piece things, so I was all psyched to start sewing these rows together, but now that I’ve been looking at them up there for the past few days, I’m thinking this is all a bit much-like maybe too busy…I have another idea for how I could use these that would be much “quieter” but it would take a lot more time and I wouldn’t be able to satisfy my need to piece…I guess I still need to think that one over!
The last time we went back to OH, I had 2 treats in the mail waiting for me. First up was this lovely beaded book mark sent by Wendy Foster:
Wendy is an incredible quilter and you might remember an amish quilt of hers from a LONG time ago because she did beautiful hyperquilting on it. (I’d link to it, but I can’t find it!) Anyway, she both quilts and beads, and you can buy some of her beaded works at her etsy shop.
My next treat in the mail was from Superior Threads:
I just LOVE their threads, so just seeing all these luscious spools all together is inspirational to me!
And last, I got to go to the Ann Arbor Quilt Show a couple weeks ago. (I got to go to the Asheville Quilt Show last weekend, but didn’t have a camera with me!). Anyway, I was really struck by this one quilt that tied for the viewer’s choice award:
This picture doesn’t come close to doing this quilt justice. This quilt was all about free motion quilting. It was composed of several quilted squares that were joined AFTER the quilting was done. BUT, the cool part was how the quilter imparted a sense of movement across the quilt simply by stitching these free motion designs that literally appeared to move across the quilt:
Interestingly, she did not even have to match up the placement of the individual “rows” of designs from one block to the next; merely having this “wave-like” appearance to the designs was enough to create the illusion of movement! How cool!!
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