Dec 28 08
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!
