“Free Motion Fun…With Vines and Leaves!” is HERE!!!!!

Our newest DVD, “Free Motion Fun…With Vines and Leaves!” (Volume 1) is finally here!! This DVD is really fun and has lots of great leaf and vine designs that are a blast to stitch! With fall just around the corner, this is the perfect time to work on learning new vine and leaf quilting motifs! This DVD has a total run time of 2 hours and 3 minutes and has 14 chapters that cover, among other things:

The Basic Curvaceous Vine:

(Once you’ve learned the mechanics of stitching out this vine, you’ll be able to stitch many different vines simply by substituting in different leaf shapes!)

The Whimsical Vine:

(Can you tell this is the cousin to the whimsical feather?!)

The Aggressive Vine:

The Light and Airy Branching Vine:

The Loop-D-Loop Vine:

The Garland of Daisies and Leaves:

Variation of Garland of Daisies and Leaves:

The Garland of Dogwood and Leaves:

The Garland of Roses and Leaves:

(Do you recognize the irregular swirl in there?!!)

Then, we have 3 chapters of hyperquilting Vines, kind of reminiscent of the hyperquilting chapters from the Feathers DVD:
Hyperquilting the Basic Vine:

Hyperquilting the Loop-D-Loop Vine:

Hyperquilting the Whimsical Vine:

Hyperquilting the Garland of Dogwood and Leaves:

After that, we have a chapter called “Ask Patsy!” where we answer many questions that I am asked routinely, and learn a lot of fun tricks! Check out the preview video clip and check out the free downloadable line drawings! These vines are really fun to stitch and I promise that you’ll have some real fun with them!

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New Free Video Tutorial Posted on YouTube!

It all started with the quilt above…I can’t show a picture of the whole quilt because I’m not allowed to yet, but it was very fun to do the free motion machine embroidery on the gingko leaves after I’d added some color highlights with colored pencils and singed the edges of the silk with a burning tool. So, I thought it might be fun to make a video tutorial on how to do some of those techniques! The quilt that I make in the tutorial is this one:

I’m not so wild about the background quilting on it, but I like the rest of it and it was fun to make! This picture shows the fused leaf after color has been added to the fabric and the edges were singed:

These gingko leaves are pretty large-they measure around 28 inches long by about 18-20 inches wide. I like the drama of over-sized objects!
Now this next picture shows that original gingko leaf after it’s been free motion embroidered and the area around it has been quilted:

Isn’t it just so neat to be able to make all these added details to make a quilt so interesting?! You can watch the 2 part tutorial at the following addresses: (N.B. These are addresses to cut and paste, not actual links!)

Part 1:

Part 2:

And if you missed our previous 2 part tutorial on trapunto, you can also view those on YouTube at:

Part 1:

Part 2:

In other news, I also had a really great weekend dyeing fabric. I always start getting nervous in the fall, feeling that I need to dye a lot of fabric to get me through the winter, just like squirrels hoard acorns! My first afternoon was spent dyeing blues, purples, and greens:

And my second afternoon I spent dyeing reds and oranges:

Aren’t these colors just mouth watering?! I dyed mainly cotton sateens and egyptian cotton but I also dyed some silks as well. Next, I dyed some silk roving and bamboo roving…

And last, but not least, some wool/rayon felt:

If you are having trouble finding reasonably priced fabric, roving, and felt to dye, you can find a lot of this stuff at either Joanne Fabrics or Hancock fabrics. Joanne’s has Egyptian cotton for $6.99/yd, (incredibly smooth-it has a great hand to it!), as well as 100% wool, ($14.99/yd) and a 65/35% wool/rayon blend. They also has a cotton sateen for $5.99 and it dyes up beautifully, although I don’t like it as well as I used to because they’ve changed it this year and it’s not nearly as soft or luminous. Hancock’s has a great cotton sateen for $4.44/yd and also has a wool/rayon felt, and that’s the felt I dyed above. It dyes beautifully with procian dyes but looks pretty ho-hum with acid dyes. I got my silk roving and bamboo roving at Earth Guild in Asheville, NC. Happy dyeing!
Oh, and I almost forgot! The next DVD, “Free Motion Fun…With Vines and Leaves!” has been at the replicators for awhile and should be back soon…expect it to be available for sale in the next 1 1/2 weeks! I’ll post a preview video clip and also post some new free downloads when it goes live!

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“Synaptic Transmission” is Finally Done!

I FINALLY finished this quilt! This should not be a big deal as the quilt itself measures only 27 3/4 x 27 3/4, but this has taken me a long time! The free motion embroidery, quilting, and binding were finished immediately, but sewing on the beads by hand took me much longer than I’d anticipated. I apologize for the pictures. This quilt must be shipped out early tomorrow am and it is already packed, and I did not realize until just now that the pictures are all much darker than the actual quilt:

This is a close up of the axons releasing the neurotransmitters, (blue beads), and the dendrites picking them up:

This is the background quilting. I had several ideas for background fill patterns and all of them left me with a sense of the gyri and sulci of the brain but this one did the most:

That background quilting was done with a Polyester variegated thread by Signature. I’m very fond of many of the polyester variegated colors made by Signature, (and this color was PERFECT for my quilt!), but I’ve had a mixed experience with Signature-sometimes they work great and other times, they make me tear my hair out. Fortunately, this time the quilting was effortless! Here is a shot that gives you a sense that the nerve cell bodies are trapuntoed, or a bit more prominent:

And remember that I did that by placing an extra layer of batting behind them:

I like this quilt well enough, but I’m very glad it’s done. It’s time to move on to something else!

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