Cottage CQ..Center Complete

While I'm waiting for the last of my tools to arrive for my experiments in French Flower making, I've put in a few days' work on my Cottage CQ.

This project has been a series of tough challenges since Day 1...there were so many technical issues to resolve. The design decision making was almost more difficult. (I must have redone that fan above the cottage 5 or 6 times.)

But at last I've committed to a solution, and have sewn it down. This is it!

There is quite a bit more work to do on the water section...but I am coming down the home stretch on this one at last....

Cottage CQ....Playing in the Waves

I knew this was going to be fun!!!

I gathered my materials, starting with these....

This funny pile of orts (def: n. Archaic, crumbs, scraps; this is a great Scrabble word!) is actually a bunch of slivers of fabric that have been rotary cut at the fold line.

Then I got out my luscious little bin of blue Kreinik metallic threads...

I love Kreinik's threads!

Finally, I got out all my bubble-esque beads...

I have done a few lake projects with bubbles in the waves....but I'd never beaded over wave-printed fabric before. I was excited to start and see what would happen.

I pinned the orts in place...some along seams, and some "cross country". I couched them down with the Kreinik thread, and then added a line of herringbone stitching below.

Then I began sewing on bubbles!

This is just the beginning...but oh, I do think it is going to work.
Happy times...

Cottage CQ...More Trees!

Sometimes it takes living with a work-in-progress for a long while before necessary additions become apparent.

As I was preparing my "lucky glass"--or "sea glass", as some call it--to be sewn onto the quilt, it just hit me that there wasn't quite the balance on each side of the arc of the trees that I wanted. I needed to add a little more of the pine tree element on each side.
So after I got my lucky glass sewn on, that's what I did. For five hours.

But first, here's the process with the lucky glass. I handle the bits of worn glass the same way I do rocks...glue a buttonback onto each piece and then sew it on.

That pathetic wrinkled tube is E6000 glue. I am really due for a new one. But I managed to squeeze some out, apply it to each buttonback with a toothpick, and then push the backs onto the lucky glass pieces.
It took about 3 hours to set up.

In order to sew them on, I needed to make a hole for each one through the quilt to accomodate the protruding shank of the buttonback.
I got out my scalpel of a seamripper and just made my cuts.

Surgeons must be bold and decisive! Confident!
This was still scary though...no going back.

The shank is poked through to the back here. I use Silamead beading thread for this because it is extra strong.

Now for an overall view...

I've couched on the initial "wave lines" along the bottom section. These will guide the sewing on of a zillion little beads (read, bubbles). Also more stitching will follow these lines.
I've also decided what I'm going to write in the sand below the line of lucky glass, too.....

I have much work left on this project but can now at last get a glimpse of the finish line....and this is my favorite part of the race, too, that sprint to the finish.

Thanks so much for your comments and suggestions, especially with regards to those shingles on the roof! I'm going to wait to decide on that until the rest of the quilt is done....meanwhile, all those bubbles are the next order of business.

Cottage CQ...Surgery

It's funny how design decisions will reveal themselves slowly on a long-term (and experimental) project like this.
There was one section on the grassy area that didn't feel right to me, and hasn't for awhile, but I wasn't sure what it was or what to do about it.
Then this morning, bingo, there it all was in my head, so I decided to act on it right away.

It's the light colored grasses with the bullion seedheads. They stick out too far to the right.

I put a piece of tracing paper in place to see if the solution was to straighten out that edge and instantly thought, "Oh yes that's it".

I pinned the new fabric patches in place and whipstitched them on, right over what was under it.

After carrying over the French knotted flower motif from the patch to the right, I decided the background fabric was too light. Prismacolor pencil to the rescue.

Then some yarn got couched along the new seams, creating some more of those "seam driven motifs" I've been trying out with this project.
Surgery complete!

I did add the same couched yarn treatment to the other side.

I like how this reads so much better. Those vertical seams forming the oval will eventually have cording couched over them to define them...

Nothing like designing on the fly. But it's getting there.....

Cottage CQ...Hydrangea Shrubs

AveryClaire asked on my last post what inkAid is.
It is a coating that you brush onto fabric--and then you let it dry--before running it through your printer. My experimental goal for this treatment was to get sharper, more saturated imagery on the fabric than would have been possible with it untreated.
I found this to be the case. The detail is in high focus and the colors are vivid. But the stuff makes the fabric stiff and each push of the needle requires much more pressure than normal. My fingertips are actually quite perforated these days.

So that is why the moaning and groaning over the inkAid. I do think it's great, just not for stitching through.

Fortunately, I didn't have to on my last bout of motif stitching.

I used an idea from Helen M. Steven's Embroidered Landscapes for my hydrangea shrubs.

However, as I got going on this the temperature outside plummeted, and my sewing room became too cold to work in.

That is snow comin' down outside. This room has lots of windows and just a little space heater, and I can't get it above about 50 degrees F on days like this...too cold for my fingers to work properly!
So I set up a card table and moved on into the living room where my guys hang out on their computers.

May likes to hang out here too, looking out the window right next to me. She also attacks my threads if she gets a chance.
(That is "Summer Lake Day" hanging to the left there.)

So back to the hydrangeas...

I made one on each side. This shows how one of them looked before the silk ribbon leaves and French knot flowers went on.

And here is a finished shrub....

I may add to them to fill them out a little more, but for now I've had enough!

Here you can see them "in situ". A line of something wonderful is going to have to go between them to "ground" that section. My guess is it will be rocks and lucky glass...actually, if you enlarge the picture above that has "Summer Lake Day" in it, you can see the rocks that were sewn on that Lake Michigan quilt. I do love sewing rocks.
I posted a tutorial on that here, on another little cottage piece.

But that is going to have to wait for several days, as I have to seriously get my Christmas preparations underway.
Hoping you all are getting in the spirit of the season!

Cottage CQ...Tree Stitching

There has been a technical issue that I finally attended to over the last few days.

The large areas in the trees section that are printed using the inkAid needed to be secured to the foundation fabric. They were puffy, not lying flat (and you know I hate that), and needed some texture anyways to blend in with all the stitching going on around these large "patches".

This view of the back illustrates the tactic I took to fix this. You can see all those lines of stitching in the plain white areas. I may have to add more, but this was enough for now.
On the front it looks like this:

I didn't want the stitching to stand out too much, so I matched it to the background. This is all backstitching.

I decided there was no need to outline both sides of the branches and trunks....this stitching is essentially acting as quilting; it isn't there as a design element so much.

In the pine tree sections I just made little stitches to blend in and hold the fabric down.

Frankly, this was boring work and that inkAid is a beast to stitch through. But I had to see if this would work. It's a good thing it did, because once you make a needle hole in this treated fabric, that hole is there for keeps.

I will say that on normally photoprinted fabric that is soft, stiching over it to augment the image is really fun and so much easier than you might think. It is just like painting by numbers, and is a most forgiving technique.
I'm glad the cottage isn't printed on inkAid!
But I'm not ready for it yet.....think I'll play with some bushes and little flowers as my reward for all this scut work.

Cottage CQ...Beach Grasses, Continued

I'm so appreciative of your comments and am glad you are enjoying following along. Thanks!

Two days of making teeny tiny detached chain stitches and straight stitches using sewing machine thread have resulted in the left hand beach grass section being completed.

But first I put a row of ribbon across the top of the section like the row on the right side.

Very fine silk pins are good for this. I stitched the ruffles in place with little detached chains, taking the pins out as I went along.
Pat Winter dyed this "woodlands" ribbon for me and its colors are just perfect. She not only is a great stitcher, but her dyeing work is superb, too. And she is quite familiar with the colors surrounding Lake Michigan!

This beach photograph was taken from much farther away than the one on the right (see previous post), so to stay true to scale, I had to make everything much finer.
Looking at the quilt as a whole, I don't think this will actually "read" as a completely different vantage point, however. But that's o.k.
Things are confusing enough without that!

I developed the center grassy section a little more, too.

That's more of Pat's ribbon along the bottom. Isn't it perfect?
I deliberately made this little triangular area line up with the roof peak of the cottage....

Here's the middle of the quilt so you can see that.
It was just my attempt to subtly line things up compositionally...these two points directly line up with the sun overhead too, though you can't see that in this picture. I was trying to structure a little order in amidst the randomness of the piecing in the trees.

Next I want do something with the large printed tree sections that so far have nothing on them. I can't just leave them "bare".....

Cottage CQ...More Trees

Back to work on what I've come to think of it as a hybrid between a crazy quilt and a landscape quilt....

It may be hard to tell, but I've added some more pine trees to either side of the cottage, extending them down into the midground area.
More grasses and bushes coming next.....

Cottage CQ...Grasses

This has been fun.
I'm not finished with the grassy section yet but I've made good progress. I feel like I'm getting into the groove of combining landscape embroidery with crazy quilt stitching and it is melding the way I hoped it could.
I'll show details and then the overall view....

As usual, the larger stitches are in the foreground of the "picture plane"....

...and the finer stitching is "farther away", visually. Hopefully this helps to create the illusion of a depth of field.

This section is not quite done yet, but you get the idea.
I think it needs many more bullion seedheads.

I've enjoyed dipping into my stash of nature-colored threads, yarns, and ribbon so much.
There will be lots of tweaking of course but things are really flowing now for the first time since this project began....and it has me looking forward with much more confidence to the waves section.

Now I'm signing off until Sunday...
...and want to wish ALL of you a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. We are so blessed...!

Cottage CQ...Woods Finished

Well, all the seams are covered anyway.
Here is the left side....

....and below is the right side.....

The light green "leaves" along the seam-trees with the gray trunks are lazy daisies using Kreinik Soie Noppe thread with little silk floss lazy daisies in the centers of the lighter colored ones. I've been pretty heavy handed with the iron so have smashed these threads pretty flat. At the very last stage I'll put a few more "puffy" ones on top.
All these seam treatments are close in color and value to the background fabrics. I just wanted to increase the complexity of the texture and emphasis some of the lines without making it too busy with a lot of contrast.

Next comes the first of the foreground grasses....

We'll see how it goes!
It is fun to be experimenting, no doubt. But I'm already thinking ahead to my next mini crazy quilt project....it is going to be SO traditional.
My brother Ben always says that "moderation is the oscillation between extremes".....oh that is too true....
(He also describes himself as a "paranoid optimist"....I do so love my brother...)

Cottage CQ...Traditional Seams

Thank you all for your comments about enjoying the progress of this experiment!

It is definitely a departure from normal crazy quilting...
...although I have been putting some simple and traditional stitching on the seams around my "seam driven motif" trees. I just had to see how the two approaches would integrate.

I want to make sure this "reads" as a crazy quilt, not just a landscape quilt. These traditional stitches give that connotation, but they look kind of woodsy, too, mainly because of their similiarity of line, scale, and color to the printed imagery.
Fun, fun! I think it's working o.k.

Here's a view of the woods section so far....

I want to keep the seams fairly simple, mostly because that inkAid treated fabric is so awful to stitch through. Bent needles, pliers, many jabs into my fingers while stitching...I will not be using that stuff in an application like this again. Yowie....
The beach was mostly printed without it, and I look forward to stitching through that nice soft cotton....
Oh, and the bulldozers have been and gone, too...

The transition is better and makes more sense visually.
The shape seems a little lopsided, like the central oval around the cottage has a bump in it. But that's where embellishment can solve my problems. Some nice clumps of beach grass along that bottom edge should even things out nicely....at least, hopefully!

Cottage CQ...Seam Driven Motifs

"Seam driven motifs" is a term I made up to describe how I'm experimenting with this stitching on the Cottage CQ. I want the seams to be covered with stitching, as in all crazy quilting, but those stitches are supposed to contribute to the representational imagery of the composition. So I had to come up with a new designation.
It was fun to read Sharon B getting excited about this here.

These trees on the right side of the cottage show what I mean. The stitching of the leaves and pine needles follow the seams between the patches, but they create the objects, the tree motifs, as well.
Here are the trees on the left side...

I did have to go "cross country" across one of the patches on this side, as the seams hadn't been sewn exactly in a tree like configuration.
But we don't want too much pre-planning here, do we?

Here's the overall view. I've printed up some "woods to beach" transition fabrics for that left hand side that's been bothering me. So now I'll get out the bulldozer and see if I can reshape that beach more to my liking...

CQ Landscape...A Warm-Up, Part 3

Well, things got very swirly.
This piece is starting to look like Kate Bush's music...that song "The Big Sky" comes to mind. She goes so wild and chaotic at the end of the song, just raving and reveling in her freedom.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C88yb-OVNmw&feature=related
The visuals are distracting in this video (and dated)...the music is what I mean...

And I let things go wild in my little quilt here, too....just kind of let 'er rip!!!

There's not much more to add, although I think a dark border would make a big difference here. I'll give it one more day's work... ;-)

CQ Landscape...A Warm-Up, Part 2

I added another "layer" of work on this little experiment, some stitching over the felted on leaves. I used the Kreinik Soi Noppe that I love so much. They don't make it anymore... ;-( or I would give a link on where to buy some.

Also, thanks to Leonie's most welcome critique in an email, I've covered up some of the visually distracting dark patches "behind" the branch with more leaves. There is some more filling in to do, too, as I go along. And lots more detail on the branches.
Working with the Babylock embellisher is such an immediate process! I love how fast it is.

Here's a detail shot. I've added the barest seam treatments along the patch edges on the left there. So far that element seems unintegrated with the rest of the piece, so I'll be addressing that issue next...

Also...I want to make sure you all know that Pam Kellogg is again posting on her blog! She is changing the emphasis a little bit...there is still absolutely gorgeous stitching going on, but her approach is now more personal and inspirational. Have a look! Welcome back, Pam...we missed you!

CQ Landscape...A Warm-Up

For the past year I have been mulling over how make a crazy landscape quilt.....I'm finally starting to get a handle on it so have been playing with a practice piece to get things rolling.
Newer readers might like to check out these pages of my website. They show a good sample of my landscape "phase" as a sane quilter.

I know that I definitely want to combine printed photos on fabric with more traditional CQ type fancy fabrics, soI dug into a small pile of "reject" prints that went into the mix below. This little piece is about the fall trees...and the wind that gets the leaves blowing across the sky....

This measures 16" X 24".
"Om Tat Sat" is Sanskrit and can be translated as "Supreme Absolute Truth". I always feel God in the sky. There is a wonderful saying, "I drink Thy power from the mighty cup of the wind..."
It's been really windy around here, too!

Those brown limbs are a fabulous chenille yarn that has been felted in place with the Babylock Embellisher. Thanks, Leonie, for that great yarn!

Then I used the embellisher to "felt applique" the leaves down...except for the shiny ones. Those are holographic lame that have been fused in place.
I've embroidered some finer detail on some of the branches, and am trying out some simple stitches along the seams in the bottom right section.
I just want to see how to combine these different elements.

Oh, and just for fun, here is basically the same quilt from 1997...

It is 16" X 19".
I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same...