Time for Fun Stuff!

Yesterday, we drove from NW Ohio down to Asheville, NC. It was 72 degrees and we bought gas for $1.31…what’s going on here?!! This has been a wild year and the last couple of days are just more examples of the same!

It’s been a whirlwind of a month and now I’m looking forward to a week of fun! I kicked things off here today by indulging in some much missed fiber-related activities. I started off by overdyeing some very cheap cotton fabric to use for quilting design samples. Here’s a picture of the baseline fabric that cost me $2.50/yard:

Kinda ugly stuff, n’est pas?! Here’s an after shot once I’d overdyed it in an amethyst dye bath:

…and here’s another piece of the same baseline fabric after it had soaked in a fuscia-red dye bath:

(By the way, these weren’t dyed in my normal way; these were dyed via immersion dyeing where you just dump the fabric into a tub of dye and kind of scrunch it up some and then just walk away-very easy). Next up, I got some work done on an amish quilt I need to use as a sample for hyperquilting. Here’s a shot of the center feathered wreath:

…and here’s a shot of one of the four outer wreathes. These are all ready to be hyperquilted with some fun new hyperquilting designs:

Remember that leaf quilt I was working on a few months back? Sad to say, it has been packed and repacked in a suitcase many times over the last couple of months, never to be touched! I finally got a bit of free motion emboidery started on the top:

(Try looking at the bottom center and you’ll see it). I’m doing this as free motion embroidery so that it will appear as a different texture/depth than the other vines that get quilted on it once it’s in a true quilt sandwich. I’m using an iron-on tear away temporary stabilizer on the back:

and that will be removed once I’m done with the embroidery and ready to put it into a sandwich. (hopefully, it won’t be another 2-3 months before THAT can happen!)

I want to tell you about a great quilting blog. Anita Heady is a friend I’ve made through the Fiber Arts Alliance here in Asheville. She lives in GA but drives up for the meetings and always brings these eye-catching pieces of work that she’s currently working on. She usually posts pictures on her blog of her latest creations and her mini-tutorials are great. Scroll way back on her blog to see them all-there’s a lot of great stuff to learn and plenty of eye candy!

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Evolution of a Feathered Wreath and New Cool Website

I have been playing around with many different feather designs and had taken many pictures over the last week with an intention to post them, but when I went to re-size them tonight I found that I had to delete almost all of them. Sometimes, lighting becomes a real problem for me and can completely drive me nuts! That is what happened here-they were so dark that I couldn’t even make out my thread lines. I took a few more pictures today on a feathered wreath I made this afternoon. This is the wreath in its most basic form. It is stitched in size 12 pearl cotton Prescencia embroidery thread and outlined with a violet rayon:

This next shot is the second step in what I call “double-triple hyperquilting.” I apologize, but this photo simply doesn’t do it justice because all the colors are so off. In this next phase, the wreath is inlined with a magenta/maroonish thread.

Notice that this inlining is different from my normal inlining; the plumes are long and skinny and this is because we’re going to go in with a third thread for another round of hyperquilting, so we need more space! This last photo shows the next round of hyperquilting. In this one, I went in with gold rayon thread and added a double splay line:

…and this closeup shows it a bit better:

This was very fun to do and it totally indulges my thread obsession at the same time! Can’t wait to play around with the next one!

In other news, I have had the good fortune to become friends with a wonderful fiber artist named Judy Simmons over the last few years; I met her in our fiber arts group in Asheville, North Carolina. Her work is beautiful and she is a wonderful teacher, so if you ever have an opportunity to take a class from her, DO IT!! She emailed me this weekend that she finally has a website (yeah, Judy!!) so take some time to check it out. The pictures don’t totally capture the lovely textures in her work, but they are beautiful nonetheless!

I’ve had a few emails about the Thanksgiving Sale and it is now over. Actually, there was problem today with the USPS link (this is a USPS problem, not a problem w/our server) so we were not able to process orders online today. If you had trouble earlier, know that USPS has corrected the problem and orders can now be processed. Happy Holidays!

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