Continuing the New One

I'm starting out the quilting/construction of this new quilt from the bottom up. There are two lightweight upholstery pieces (thank you FabMo), that are getting stitched down with fairly close lines of stitching. I chose a very light green rayon thread. I like how it pretty much disappears, reminds me of some of the Agnes Martin paintings I've enjoyed seeing at at SF MOMA. That works for me, as I wanted this piece to be a combination of things that I've learned from modern artists.

 After a couple lines stitched, I remembered to put my walking foot on, and that was working better. Stitching through upholstery stuff onto a finely woven cotton is a challenge, but I tried to take it slow at the transition point. I put on a good audio book (Missing Sister by Joshilyn Jackson) and my headphones and got the entire bottom section all quilted.

The last thing to add is the sheer, but I have to decide several things.

1. How to attach it, just at the top and leave the other 3 sides loose?
2. If I attach all four sides, whether to quilt on top of the sheer or not? 
3. If quilting it, change thread color and go with horizontal lines of stitching?
4. Do I keep the folded up (and thus darker) part at the bottom or not. If so, how to make the curve stay? (because I Really Like that curve). Maybe the stitching in the sheer could echo the curve?

I pinned up the gold part just temporarily to make sure it will still work in the composition. I am really glad I chose this hand-dyed piece for the background. It's an old one from back when I was first learning dyeing.

 I think I'll continue the walking foot lines of quilting, but probably will switch up either the thread color and/or the direction or spacing of the lines.

Still thinking up a title.

Edges Out

 After a whole lot of machine embroidery stitches, I called this Project Quilting 15.3 entry done for the prompt "Inside Out". And I titled it "Edges Out."

I was thrilled to discover that if I did one of the embroidery stitches in one direction and then in the opposite direction it created this cool interlocking circle design. 

Yes, I used the embroidered circle stitch on each of the plaid intersections.

Edges are definitely out, they are fluffy, they are stringy, they are full of texture. This is one of those pieces that feels really really nice to my fingers.

Fringing And Raveling

 I began work on my piece for Project Quilting 15.3, the theme of which is "Inside-Out". This is where I left off last night. I'm shooting for something about the same size of the previous two 8.5"x11"pieces, for Sky Color and Nest. That size was dictated by the use of a digital sketch printed out on fabric.

 The theme of Inside Out made me think of ravell-y raw edges. Which of course led to me going to the extreme of ravell-y goodness causing me to pull out my bin of smallish squares of silk and linens from FabMo. These are always so fun to work with as they act so much differently than plain ol' quilter's cotton.

I began stitching some of these pieces together with a kind of loopy machine embroidery stitch, with wrong sides together. I made sure to leave a lot of seam allowance and then spent a lot of time picking the threads to get it fringing and raveling right down to the line of stitching.

I'm using two different color threads in the top and the bottom for a little bit more color among the neutral fabrics.

This neat and tidy side is showing the wrong side for this piece as made so far. Although in any other context it'd likely be the "right" side. It's still somewhat interesting because of the different fabrics, the checks vs. stripes, but not nearly as much texture.  This piece is due to be posted by 8am tomorrow so I'll be hopefully finishing it off today.

Crowded Wall

 As you can see, I'm really running out of room on ye olde Design Wall. I got in the mode of randomly piecing, so now I have eight (front and back) pillow pieces. Today I'll be quilting the seven that aren't pre-quilted, then hopefully sewing them together with zippers on one edge. I'm going to try out this method for the zippers, fingers crossed it works. 

Really really looking forward to eliminating one big blue plastic box from underneath my sewing table. It's currently holding the four pillow blanks. They really take up a lot of room.

Green In Here

My son commented that "it's getting green in here" today, and he's right. I've gotten two more pillow sides  done and they now need to be quilted. The bottom one in this group picture has been pre-quilted. I still haven't decided if I want to do one side non-pieced, or piece both sides. So I either have one more to make, or five. There's plenty of green materials in the designated Fabmo box to use up.

This one is really lovely to pet. There's two different cotton velvets, several silk satins and one cotton embroidered silk.

This one got a little crazy pieced looking, on the angle and on the bias, so it will be interesting to quilt. There's a silk velvet burnout, a textured cotton woven, a poly-rayon,  embroidered and printed silk, printed woven cotton, and a bit of the neoprene/mesh. Another wild mixture of textures. and fabric weights.

This is the one that has been backed with batting and fairly loosely quilted.

 

Fabmo Favorites

Had another great day volunteering at FabMo's distribution in Santa Cruz.
Snagged some more greens for my couch pillow replacement plan.
As well as a few yards of that white sheer with the black lines up at the top. It has a cording along one edge and is finished on the other, I think it'll make a nice over-skirt.

FabMo in Santa Cruz

 FabMo selection event in Santa Cruz is always so fun to volunteer for, and they're coming back again on September 20th and I will definitely be there. I love seeing all the teachers scooping up materials for their classes, or college aged folks working on art projects for school or community events.

Here was my selection, I'm putting them up against the greek key lime/cream fabric I'd bought to re-upholster an ottoman. I think they go well enough to make up some good pillow covers.

Painted Silk ATC's

Here's the story on my ATC's for the CQFA meeting.

 I started out with this cream colored luscious piece of textured silk-blend snagged from FabMo.

 Using my Tsukineko ink brushes I highlighted the ridges with red.

 And then dotted the whole thing with blue. Blending the two colors with a wet brush, the inks combined with the crinkled texture acting as a mild sort of resist.

Keeping in mind that when it dries, it won't be as dark or intense, while it was still wet I added more color with Inktense watercolor blocks and then wet brushed the additional pigment to blend.

 Here's how it looks after it had time to dry and was heat-set with my iron.

 Measuring and cutting the 2.5x3.5" ATC's out of the stitched piece.

 I did some minimal quilting on each ATC, I didn't want to smash down that wonderful crinkled texture.

 Closeups of each one. I used striped washi tape which I machine embroidered either a 2 or a 5 depending on how many lines of quilting were in the ATC.

 Then I added a small piece of pink dyed wool roving, held down under some paper lace that I stitched down.

 I stitched around the edges and then zig-zagged once also.

I was really pleased with how these ATC's turned out this time and I was happy to have something to trade at the CQFA meeting. More on that tomorrow.

More Input

I got the chance to work at the Santa Cruz FabMo distribution day last week and came away with a smallish sized bag full of goodies.

 This time there was a nice selection of modern looking, simple graphics in linen or linen/cotton. This is all going into a couch quilt to go with our lime green couches. The nice cuddly flannel one I have in there done in primary/brights doesn't go at all and it visually upsets me to see it. I love the idea of all this stuff getting used instead of being thrown away, go FabMo!

I scored a nice selection of Cotton & Steel prints purchased from the Quilt Show table at the Alden Lane Nursery Show. They were leftovers cuts from this year's block-of-the-month kit, being sold at cost, saved some $$ on these, yay!  I think I love the matches print the best.

Some new backing fabrics (i.e. fabrics I find at a comparatively cheap price that I like using for the backs of quilts because I don't have to worry about how much they cost) and a few more to add to the grey-yellow quilt project box, and disco witches just because.

Santa Cruz FabMo

 I finally was able to get involved in some of the Santa Cruz Area FabMo happenings. First I helped assemble the give-aways for the Santa Cruz Mini-Maker Faire. The people that came to help were all super friendly and it was a small time commitment so I knew I could actually complete it. Plus we met in one of the new buildings that I've been curious about at the new Tannery Arts Center. It's a beautifully done live/work setup for local artists. They reused a lot of the Salz Tannery buildings and built all-new ones. We met in a communal room that had a dance floor and big windows overlooking the river. Just lovely.

It's so nice that they haul all this stuff over the hill for all the fiber folks here. There was a steady stream of very excited browsers pawing through all the stacks of fabrics. The big room at the Harvey West Park was perfect for this setup of tables.




































I couldn't resist this spaceship/blueprint/bandana cotton print, it's so cute. I think I might make napkins out of it.  And during my whole shift where I was working I kept rearranging and re-stacking the piles and these slick fabrics kept attracting my fingers. They were so different than everything else in the place. They're meant for outdoor use, so I'm going to make a pillow seat cover for our new deck bench.

Why did I choose these green/purple/brown velvets? A new living room pillow cover I think was the idea. Ours our wearing out and need replacing.

Finding Fabulous Freebies

 Here's some of the fun stuff from the freebie pile Bron brought to our last CQFA meeting from FabMo.  She always finds the most interesting stuff to bring to us and we all politely divide it up, there's never been any pinching or hitting or yelling, this is not Black Friday at Walmart after all.  I liked these four fabrics and thought it would be interesting to make two pieces one, green based and one red based, building around these as focuses with a lot of the other fabrics I've been collecting from Fabmo lately which are easily divisible into red vs. green.  I wonder sometimes what my brain is doing sometimes, I really do.  Why red and green? Who knows.  I couldn't tell you.  Maybe it will all become clear after I actually make the quilts!

 I liked this gold mum print a lot, the scale of it and the background fabric color.  I think it will make a great applique on something.

I'm going to hem up the floral embroidered fabric as napkins.  The stuff on the right is wallpaper samples,which is all bug paintings, the title of which cracked me up, Timorous Beasties.  Sounds so Gorey-esque huh?

From Leather to Kaleidoscopes

 Going a little crazy (or bored) recovering from hand surgery, so I made a couple of kaleidoscopes from a recent picture taken on my work table.  I'm happy to report that I can now wiggle the tip of my pinky finger, so far that has made the surgery worthwhile.

Can you tell what the source picture might be?

 Well it starts out with some leather.  Small leather samples from a recent trip to FabMo.  I snagged them because of all the great and varying textures.

All the shiva paintstik  colors got a try with each of the patterns, but the yellow light pearl didn't show on the white fabric of course.

  So here it is on black fabric.  And that's the source picture for the kaleidoscopes at the top of this post. Tada!