Free Silk

 

On the freebie table at Sew Day there was quite the selection of fabrics available. I spotted this piece of maybe obi (kimono sash) fabric, it's the right width, so it might be. It is a quite beautiful print, a lightweight silk.

There was this interesting section with a printed black and plain white stitched on one edge.Not sure what it was meant to be.

It's really pretty and I just liked it, the print is super interesting and sort of collage-y. 

And yes, I've added it into my 2025 fabric tracker.

Around the Kawandi

 

Another project I brought along to get some stitching done on was the Kawandi that I started in a class with Sujata Shah back in 2021. Here's how it looked before I started working on it, a little wrinkly out of the bag. 

Like counting rings on a tree, I can see I've gone around 10 times.

There's a whole lot of silk colors and types of fabrics to work with in the bag that I brought along. It's a really nice tactile experience to hold and stitch silk by hand.

I did most of the stitching outside on the balcony in the sun.

While listening to the opening day game with my SF Giants hat on. The game wasn't on hotel tv, so I got to listen to my fave Giants radio announcer, Jon Miller call the game. Too bad we lost 😞

Here's how my Kawandi looks after I'd worked on it for a few hours and traveling home smashed up in a bag again. This is displayed in my chair so it's not quite flat here.

Now I've gone around 13 times and started to add another few tiklis (the rose gold squares). The spacing of my stitching lines has changed, I need to loosen it up a little. 

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.

Return of the Silk

 

On this rainy Saturday, I headed over to Sew Day at BAM to hand off my completed Climate Change Challenge Quilt, Burn, Grow, Slide and also brought along a hand-sewing project to work on. It's been more than a year so it was time to work on my Kawandi. I started this in a really great class back in 2021 in a class with Sujata Shah.

I added several more pieces and went all the way around a few times.

It was nice to handle all these lovely silks once again. I just couldn't help myself putting the vivid green next to the fuchsia. Zing Sing!

Silk Stitching

This is the hand-stitching project I brought with me on our trip, the Kawandi that I started in February last year. I've been continuing to add new pieces as I stitch the parallel (well mostly) lines. Each edge of the new fabric piece is either overlapped or turned under and held in place by subsequent lines of stitching so that there will be no raw edges.

 I'm using mostly silks in a pretty wide range of colors, but some are just silky I think. The blue circle fabric on the left is from a tie remnant sampler that one of the CQFA people brought back to share many years ago when they took a field trip to the Robert Talbott Outlet in Carmel Valley if I remember correctly. So that one at least has a legit provenance of sorts.

Darn Good Yarn

Have you  ever seen the Facebook ads for Darn Good Yarn? They were recently advertising skirts made out of off-cuts and discards of sari fabric. Those skirts are great, very simple wrap-around and reversible too. Nice fabric and well-sewn, I've been enjoying wearing them this hot summer.

They're mostly concentrated on yarns (obviously given the name) but I noticed they had a monthly fabric club.

I just received my very first package and couldn't be more pleased, look how pretty this stuff is! Four FQ's of nice-quality silk, some of which are embroidered. And a card of coordinated color yarns in various fibers as well. How fun is this going to be to use!

GMTA Silks and Quilts

Super fantastic Mr. Husband had a trip to China once again and he recently returned with two really vibrant silks. I put them on my work table to take a picture of them and was surprised to see how well they went with the quilt I was working on.

The colors match almost exactly. GMTA (Great Minds Think Alike even 7,000 miles away!). I guess he really does pay attention to what I make and the colors that I like to use.

Now I get to decide what to make with them. One is 2 meters and the other is 1 meter. They are both a mid-weight charmeuse ( I think).

Gifts of Silk

One of the few good things about having a husband that travels as part of his work is that he occasionally has time to go shopping in far off and exotic places. Lately he's been going to China a lot, and has gotten to know the city he stays in and went off and found a....Fabric Store! Specifically a Silk Store. So I got a nice big package of these luscious silks for Christmas. They're all different types and weights in colors that I really really love. I have no idea what they'll end up in, but I love that he knows I love silk, and that he knows what colors would make me happy.
When he goes back to China later this month he said he'd go get more if I wanted anything in particular...Hmmm, do I?

What a question!

All Free!

I love free fabric, don't you? That is the situation every month, a couple committed to recycling takes all the discards from the home dec industry locally and distributes to anyone interested in using them. Luckily for me, some of my fellow CQFA members went to this month's free-for-all and grabbed extras. Which I subsequently snagged at our meeting on Saturday. There were a lot of tote bags, grocery bags, and bag bags that were part of show and tell. So I got inspired and decided to try and sew some up for myself. I'm really trying hard to not get bags at the grocery store. And maybe having some that I actually like to look at will make it easier to remember to bring them into the store with me, every time. Some of these have nice brass grommets already installed, so I think I'll try and incorporate the use of those into the design of the bag I make.

This is a handful of silk remnants from a tie manufacturer that some of the members went to visit a couple years ago. This was up for grabs and I just couldn't resist, look at those gorgeous colors, different colorways on either side. I can see this being used in a wearable, coat of many colors perhaps?

Refashioned Shirt

What I'm wearing is something I made for myself out of a ruined t-shirt in one of my favorite colors. I made the mistake of actually washing up the kitchen while wearing this and some of the cleaner made some unrecoverable bleachy type of spots.

I started out this refashioning project by adding to the bleach spots that ruined this cool green tee. A few bleach spots is yuck. A lot it turns out is yum. This was accomplished by propping up the shirt on a cardboard box in the backyard and flinging bleach undiluted via old toothbrush at the shirt. I know that would have been a good picture, but I was too busy flinging bleach around. Then I soaked it in anti-chlor (to stop the bleaching which continues until your fabric disappears), washed it, and took it to the sewing lair. bwaahahaaa.The first sewing was turning out the hems of the neckline, sleeves and bottom. All I did here was to turn the hems outwards folding them back onto the shirt. This shortened the sleeves and bottom a bit, and changed the neckline to something a bit more comfortable. The stitch I used looks like a zigzag, but it is a mending zig zag, each zig is comprised of a bunch of teeny tiny stitches. Oh, and I remembered to us a knit jersey needle (yeah me!), which works so much better when sewing t-shirts. Sewing slowly and using a lot of pins on these hems resulted in no puckers gathers or lumps.Now it was time to pin on the patches I bought from leethal. I decided to give them a little more oomph by giving them some other fabric to perch upon and relate to. One piece has upholstery fabric (this one by the coffee), one has cotton-poly, and the last has silk. All of these are recycled fabric scraps.Before stitching I made sure to try on the shirt to ensure no obvious placement problems had arisen. Those of you with breasts know what I'm talking about here.I used the same mending zig zag that isn't a zigzag stitch as I did on the hems.
I realized I didn't like how light the bleach spots were, so I obsessively colored them all in with a sharpie pen. Now I like it better with this color.



So here is how the shirt looks on the floor.
And here is how it looks on me. I have no idea what that expression on my face is meant to convey. I think I was very near to actually smiling, but who knows. The result, very comfy, unique and me.

Paper Quilting

Just for fun today, here is a how-to on the subject of paper quilting.

First I started out with a piece of white construction paper, layering torn pieces of colored tissue with white glue. As a last step at this point, I laid a white piece of tissue paper over the top while it was drying and then tore it off. This kind of muted the colors and made even more surface interest.

Definitely let it dry for at least a day, there are a lot of layers and you don't want to be sewing through wet glue(not good for your sewing machine!), or damp paper (it will tear).

My next step was stamping over the top with a large motif stamp that I carved a while ago. Just with regular ink.
Definitely looking interesting at this point, don't you think?

Next, I decided on a flowery garden theme based on how beautiful my deck flower bulbs were at the moment. I snapped some closeups of open tulips, and then some rosemary just for spice. These were cropped closely in a photo editing program and then printed out on silk. Arranged on the surface, then held down temporarily with glue stick.

For some reason, a Good Earth tea bag paper tag caught my eye, and I added it to the composition. I love their tea, and I love the little quotes on the tags. Plus if they get the tea on them, the paper looks cool when it is stained.

Make a quilt sandwich with your paper piece on top, batting, and backing fabric.

Now onto the stitching. Using an old needle (why waste a new one on sewing paper?), and your stitch length set on the longest possible length, slowly stitch away. Yes it is a little stiff, perhaps a little noisy, but it works.

When you are happy with how it looks stiching-wise, then cut it to the size you want, and zig-zag the edges. Voila', done!

Here is a detail that shows the writing that I did on the lumpy surface. The words are the botanical names of the flowers, their meanings in the Victorian flower language, and what they are used for in herbalism.

Window Banner

Thought I'd post a how-to demonstration of making a window banner. I made this up yesterday!

















First I started with some silk that had been flower-pounded a long while ago and pulled some likely supporting fabrics. I didn't want to quilt this silk, I wanted the light to come through because it shows up the details so much better. My idea was to have fabric around the silk so that the heavier fabrics would hold the weight of the piece.Oh and by the way, give the flower pounding a try, it is super easy and fun, as well as quite cathartic!













I then took a yellow hand-dye and folded it in half, sewing a silk piece to either side. One side has the raw edges showing, since I like that look.











Next I cut two strips of a purple print and folded them in half, with the raw ends meeting inside the fold. After lots of pinning those are both sewn on the long sides.



















This is how it looks so far against the window. I obviously am not worrying about straight lines, wanting a more organic looking shape to go with the natural looking flower-pounded blobs on the silk.

Lastly I took a green/purple hand-dye and an orange-yellow hand-dye for either end to finish it off. Both folded in half and stitched onto the silk ends, then up the sides, stopping at 3/4" from the top or bottom so that a hanging rod can be inserted.