I was again called upon to complete a model for my local quilt shop, Happy Apple Quilts! I am so excited when they call because it's another chance to get my name out and build my business in my new city! I sure do love longarm quilting as a profession!!
Here is the quilt they needed quilted:
It is a model using the Family Tree fabric line by Deb Strain for Moda. It's beautiful, isn't it? I took some after photos, but I can't find the blasted things! I am afraid that I may have deleted them.
Next I completed a bright and fun t-shirt quilt! Just an easy meander job, which is a joy between custom jobs!
Now I am working on a fun, textural quilt made by one of my fellow guild members. Each block is made from a piece of fabric pressed and folded into tucks.
For the month of May, my assignment for Small Wonders was to create a 12x12 with the theme of Music.
I have recently read The Painted Quilt and decided to try a technique that I read about within its pages. I drew/traced a guitar onto freezer paper, then cut out the shape with an exacto knife. I was careful to cut precisely so that I can use the resulting stencil or the mask.
Next I tried my hand at improvisational piecing for the first time.
I was so surprised at how flat it ended up after pressing! I expected to have to quilt quite a bit of lumpiness out. Steam is really a miracle worker!! Love my Reliant iron for that! Check your local quilt shop!
The technique was to use Shiva paintstiks or oil sticks around the paper edge of the shape and then brush the color into the hole. I decided to try a test piece first. Thank God for putting that thought in my head!!! My paintstiks were all dried out and didn't spread well. And the color I thought would be perfect looked black and yucky!!! I couldn't find my oil sticks (studio is still a mess...won't be able to use the 'just moved in' excuse for much longer) so I went for the acrylics and just painted in the stencil.
After quilting, I used fusible thread and foil to add guitar strings, but I messed up a little...it goobered up in spots.
I think I needed to leave the iron on longer to get the foil to stay better...
Overall, I really like how the piece turned out. I do wish the acrylic paint had kept more of the color variation it had when wet. I will have to dig for my oil sticks and try again on another little quilt!
Thanks for stopping in!
The April theme for our Small Wonders art quilt group was blue. Here is my submission. Blue made me think of my pregnancy and just after Joshua was born. There were blue onesies, blue blankets, blue toys, blue sheets, blue everything! And after he was born, I had the post-partum blues
(turned out to be post-partum thyroiditis that was eventually diagnosed as Hashimoto's disease).
For each of these little quilts, I am trying to learn a new skill or try something that I haven't done before. I am really enjoying the play! And the deadlines help me so much with getting things done.
I started with some collage on the longarm. None of the fabrics were fused-I just laid them on the base fabric and stitched around them with the longarm.
I tried some handwriting on fabric to include in this quilt. I got started after viewing Deborah Boschert's tutorial. I really liked the process and will definitely include this method again in the future.
This quilt has some machine quilting and hand stitching with floss and perle cotton. I also included some beading for a little sparkle.
I manipulated the photo of Joshua to make it fit the blue theme. If you don't have photo editing software, PicMonkey is my absolute favorite website to use for this kind of thing.
It's amazing how the brain works in remembering things. As I look at the parts of the quilt, I can remember what was going on as I completed that section. When I look at the beading, I remember that my mom was visiting and we were watching The Day the Earth Stood Still (the newish version). When I was stitching the shapes down on the longarm, I had The Breakfast Club playing on the computer in the studio.
This month's theme is music! I am sure you will be waiting eagerly to find out what I was watching as I worked on that one!
