"Home is Where the Quilt Is"...

Every year I am most happy to support the annual quilt contest and fundraiser held by the Alliance for American Quilts.  I am not eligible to win, being a board member--and the prizes are really great--but I love the design challenge and to join my fellow quilters in this effort.

This year's theme is "Home is Where the Quilt Is", and the quilt must be shaped like a simple house, in the set dimensions of 15" X 19 1/2".

Did I love making my quilt!  It was inspired by this part of the view out my sewing room window.

Especially that little barn.....

I did have to simplify everything of course...
Here are a few more details...

This tatting was given to me by Marie, who was in my last post. I just brushed it with some Tsukineko ink to turn it into the sun.

I can't leave out three dimensional flowers, can I?

It's been too long since I've played in the flowers!  Spring must be coming to the Washougal River Valley....

I have been collecting vintage quilt blocks for a long time and felt that they would help with the theme of this quilt.  I pieced those white and green flying geese using vintage fabrics oh...about...20 years ago!

The contest quilts will be displayed all over the country this summer, and then auctioned off on EBay in the fall, as in years past.  The income is critical for the Alliance for American Quilts which as a non-profit accomplishes so much on a very lean budget.  I hope you will make an entry too; find the information here.

There is a HandiQuilter out there for the winner, as well as many other prizes.  But most of all, you will be supporting a great cause and participating in a wonderful challenge, keeping our quilting tradition fresh and new!  The deadline is June 1, 2012, so you still have lots of time....

Quick Projects

...and I mean quick!
With just a day or two to get these done, I sat at my machine for some crazy quilting. Yes, those built in stitches do come in handy sometimes.

I needed a 6" X 6" quiltlet for a gift, so whipped this out in an afternoon. It felt strange not to be doing handwork but it was still fun.

I also was behind on a fabric postcard swap, so pulled this one together in an hour. The trick was having all those flowers cut out beforehand. I have a big stash of those... ;-)

The flowers were fused on, then a layer of tulle was quilted over them, with the tulle finally touched up with a little Tsukineko ink.
Sometimes it is so great to simply play, just thinking about the intended recipient all the while!

Do remember, I will be drawing the winning name from the comments on my review post of Emily Cier's book, Quilt Remix on Wednesday, January 19th. So you have until the 18th at midnight to enter and win a free copy of her fabulous book! I'll announce the winner on Wednesday.....from here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6KcsLZwq3w

Talk to you then!

"Granddaughters' Flower Garden"...Painting Flowers

I didn't want my flowers to compete too much with the Grandmother's Flower Garden blocks in the border. More like they were "growing from the same soil"...

...so I kept to the same 1930's color palette.
I used a diluted Tsukineko ink to get the color on them.

Once they dried, I've been playing with their arrangement on the quilt.

Click on the photo to get a better view. I've placed the brown silk ribbon around the quilt to give myself a visual on how it will look bound.
These flowers are still pretty subtle looking, blending in perhaps too much.
But we can fix that....!

I usually don't have trouble parting with my fund-raising quilts (this is for the Alliance for American Quilts), but this one might be a little harder to send off....

Vintage CQ...Flower #5

I love my Tsukineko inks....

They are just the thing to get the specific colors I want on a small amount of lace....

...for the fifth block in the series...;-)

Millinery Flower Experiments

Your comments and emails about my last post were so sensitive and loving...truly, our corner of the bloggosphere is filled with sweet souls. Thanks, everyone.....

This week-end I changed focus to play with the French Flower making tools that I borrowed from Susan Elliot. These are tools that allow you to permanently shape fabric that has been stiffened and cut out into petal shapes. Then you assemble them into 3 D flowers.
You heat the tools over an open flame and then....

Why not just come have a look?

Here are my gathered tools and supplies. Top left shows the tools...they are solid brass balls and other shapes with wooden handles. Below them is my "sand pillow", which is used as my tooling surface. My little denatured alcohol (also known as methylated spirits) burner is next to the pillow on the plate. I found it on eBay.
The fabrics to the right were all soaked in a solution of one part PVA archival quality glue to four parts water and then hung up to dry. This makes the fabric slightly stiff, and prevents the cut edges of the petals from fraying. It also allows the petals and leaves to hold their shapes, once tooled.
My pile of stamens, glue, scissors, and thread complete my set up.


The first thing I did was play with the stamens a little bit.

I wanted to see if I could use Tsukineko inks to color over the red ends...I wanted orange. It worked pretty well.

Then I took some little premade buds and sewed a ring of beads at their bases. Kind of picky work, but I wanted to see how it would look. Maybe ok...

The next thing I did was cut out my shapes. I didn't really plan my flowers ahead, and didn't use templates. I just wanted to see how the different kinds of fabrics behaved. I've got dupioni silk, silk habotai, silk chiffon, silk charmeuse, cotton batik, and commerically printed quilters' cotton. There is some stiffened nylon lace in there, some upholstery fabric, some silk organdy...I just grabbed a bunch of stuff.

Here you can see me shaping an organdy petal in the sand pillow. A smaller-balled tool is heating up in the flame.

Whoops! Duh, the tool was too hot for the nylon lace.
You knew that was going to happen, didn't you? After this little mishap I let the tool cool off before I used it on the lace and it worked fine.

This special tool is used to put the center vein into the leaf shape.

My shapes are all tooled and ready to be assembled into flowers.
I tried this two ways, by sewing the shapes onto fabric, and by creating "free standing" flowers on wire.

Obviously, sewing them onto fabric was what came naturally to me. The chiffon flower is at the top, with a bead and some French knots in the center.
The purple flower below is sort of camellia shaped, and has some little silk ribbon roses in its center to act as stamens.
The peony flower has one of the ready made stamens poked through to the back and then sewn down.
That background fabric is some of the lovely handpainted cotton that Vicki Welsh sent to me.

Not too bad for a first try!

The free standing flowers were more difficult, and involved glueing the petals at their base to the wire at the base of the stamen. I was a klutz at this...

They are a little hard to photograph, too!
My husband said the top flower looks "druggy".
I like it, though. I used an abstract cotton print for the petals. And I love how the cotton behaves.
The crocus-like flowers are made from the dupioni, which also takes the tooling really well.
Below them is a flower I actually made from some pre-fab petals I had on hand from the crafts store...they sell them in the wedding section. They are mixed in with some organdy petals, with French knots in the center.

Those were Saturday's flowers. Today I just made one, my favorite of all flowers, the peony...

This time I laid out my flower as I cut out the shapes. Makes sense.
I used a peony print cotton. Why not? There is also pink lace and silk inner "feather" petals.

For the center I decided some needlepunch would be nice. I am using 6 strand rayon floss, and needed a heavy fabric, as the punch needle was big and made large holes in the fabric. This fabric scrap worked great.

Here are my petals and leaves all tooled and ready to go.

And here is my peony!
The silk background square is about 6" X 7".

Here is what I have learned so far:

--the lighter weight the fabric, the more glue is required in the ration of glue/water when preparing the fabric. The lightweight silks didn't hold their shape as well as the heavier fabric.

--it's great to mix different fabrics in the same flower for interest. That's why the lace petals were in there. You can mix organdy or chiffon with charmeuse for the same kind of effect.

--Tools need to be heated to different temperatures depending on what fabric you are using. The charmeuse burned, for some reason, when the tool was really hot, but the cotton and dupioni didn't.

--Even after the flower is created, you can do some creative refining with your scissors to get a petal's shape just right....or to cut off any wispy frayed threads (but there were hardly any).

The tools can be purchased here...but they are pretty expensive.

My burner is an old Swedish Triangia stove I got here. Poke around online if there are none left at the link. It uses denatured alcohol, found in the paint section of the hardware store.

This is early days for me...I know I'll be doing a lot more experimenting.
Petal shapes could be embroidered before they are tooled, for example....and...and...and....

Spring CQ...Primula and Calibrachoa

It was briefly sunny yesterday, and we so enjoyed using up our ration of nice weather for the week. I went outside and took a few pictures.

Here's a corner of the garden with my Giant Allium in the center left of the picture. I love those things, my "Dr. Suess" flowers.

But really, it's mostly been pouring and 55 degrees Fahrenheit so I've stayed inside, cooked curry, and sewn some more flowers on to my quilt.

These are again of the "inspired by variety", not botanically in any way accurate.
Primula, or "Primrose", and Calibrachoa, or "Million Bells" have both appeared in my garden over the years, so they qualify for this quilt, which is turning out to be a visual/horticultural memoir of sorts.
I needed the bright yellow shapes of the Primrose and the trailing habit of the Million Bells.


These oya from my friend Rengin in Istanbul were the perfect shape, but not yellow/orange enough, so I tried my trusty Tsukineko inks. The thread that these needlelace flowers are made from didn't absorb the color well enough though.


So I brought out the big gun...a Marvy Fabric Marker! Big bright yellow, real fast...


Those leaves are done with the Kreinik Soie Noppee silk thread I mentioned yesterday.


Here's the whole spray.....

...and there it is in a larger view.

This is really so much fun....makes up for all the rain.....almost!

Spring CQ...Helianthemum

I love the saturation and delicate coloring of the little helianthemum (Helianthemum Nummularium) blooms...

In setting out to put a version of them on my quilt, I knew I would be taking a leap into a brighter intensity of color than what I've used before in this piece, and that this would start altering the composition of my quilt. But after warming up on those less obtrusive flowers, I was ready.
It is all part of the plan....scary to jump in, though!

You can see the two blooms I picked to bring inside while coloring my lace flowers. I am using Tsukineko ink for this.

Here is a real bloom next to the textile one going on. That's Edmar rayon thread in the stamens.

Fast forward...here they are all sewn on. That is ribbon from Riversilks in the leaves. Great stuff...it really doesn't run while being stitched!

And here it is in place on the quilt, in the lower left quadrant.

I want to balance out the Dame's Rocket, which is along the right edge of the quilt, with some Siberian Iris (Iris sibirica) along the left side.

If the #$%^& sun would ever come out, these blooms would pop open in no time. But I kind of like the idea of putting some buds on the quilt...they always suggest growth. These make a nice vertical element, too...and will go on next.

As a parting shot for this post, I want to share some garden art that my son Chad made in "clay class" this year; high school graduation requirements necessitated that my art-phobic son take one studio fine art class, so pottery it was.
Are you ready for his final project?

Yes, it is a snail, though to me it is just like the slugs that cause us grief around here.
Please note the tattoo along the side of the head, and if you look closely, the Frankenstein-like scar at the neck.
When he presented this to me I was understandably speechless...finally I stammered, "It's...it's....wow, Chad..."
"I know, Mom, it's really ugly. But it's cool."
"It's sure.............something..." my voice trailed off in wonder.....

But now it has pride of place guarding the broccoli.

Embellisher Experiment #7, Felted Background...and Take it Further, March

This is also going to count as my Take it Further challenge for March. Noticing the little things...

I love to make fresh flower collages and then photograph them...old time blog readers remember this from last year I am sure. Well, yesterday marked the beginning of the flower season for 2008!
I thought it would be fun to use the Embellisher to help create the background fabric that I would lay my flowers out on. The printed fabric image from the resultant photograph will in turn become the center of a small crazy quilt. (I can't stay away from CQing for very long.)

The TIF concept came into play yesterday as I hunted the yard for blooms, and noticed the tiniest signs of growth everywhere. From the delicate fronding on the moss to some wee spider egg cocoons at the base of a forsythia flower...there were tiny miracles everywhere that gave me big thrills!

I started with some plain muslin, painting it with Tsukineko inks.

Then I started laying down some silk and merino fibers with the embellisher.

After all the fibers were swirled on there (also a few shreds of sheer silk), I laid out the lace I wanted to include. I just pinned that in place, though, as I will want to reuse it elsewhere.

Then I went out into the cool gray morning and found riches in the tiniest details!

So here we have hellebore, primula, forsythia, miniature and large sized daffodils, violets, grape hyacinth, some tiny pink flowers I don't know the name of, and the humble vinca...with two kinds of moss tucked in the corners. The spider egg cocoons are the three little white dots you see along the left edge, right in the center.
There is going to be lettering applied in the central blue space...

This was printed on cotton sateen from Dharma....and is for Easter, of course.... ;-)

Now to get piecing!

Take It Further, February...Rolled Ribbon Roses

I took this picture at Freda Butler's house last week-end. It is a detail of a lovely vintage embroidered bag she had up on her wall. I thought those roses might look good on my Take It Further block for February, if I could figure out how to make them.

Well, I did NOT figure out how they were done and came up with these instead. I won't give a tutorial because I was literally all thumbs making these! But I do like how they came out.

For this month's challenge I also decided to try out some of Pam Kellogg's waste canvas seam treatments from her new book. Here are some leaves in progress. I like doing this kind of work so much....the counting and grid give a solid structure to work within. Sometimes that is just very satisfying.

Here they are in progress, on 10 count canvas....That is yummy Sasse Lynn thread sent to me from Susan Nixon.

And here they are completed. You might notice they look a little darker in this picture. That is because once they were done and the canvas was pulled off, I thought the leaves were just too light. So I very carefully painted the threads with some Tsukineko ink, which worked great.

Here is another of Pam's designs. This one took awhile, but it was worth it.

This was done on 14 count canvas.

And here is the block as a whole thus far.
As I've been stitching on it, I have been musing that it is not about innocence lost so much...but more about just being young, being 17...remembering that special time in my life before the buds had quite opened.....

Embroidered Cottage Portrait, Continued

This place truly is my favorite subject...
My Uncle Hal remembered Sunday morning church services on the porch shown in this picture, back in the 1920's...back then the services would rotate from cottage to cottage along the row all through the summer.
There were Fourth of July parades conducted with great pomp as well, with fireworks blown up over the water at night.
My dad had teen-aged parties there where he charmed one and all with his piano playing...he went there with my mom for their honeymoon....one of my brothers died there when we were children ( I wouldn't let my own boys go near water without me watching them like a paranoid crazy mommy for years because of that)....my own summers there were the light of my youth, even when all hell broke loose in my family, beginning with Freddie's drowning...
....and still the place never changes. It exists outside of time. I go there now as a member of the older generation, finding such peace and love and beauty as my extended family has knit back together in our renewed appreciation for one another....

I added a tiny bit of blue Tsukineko ink, mixed with clear aloe gel to keep it from speading, into the sky area above the roof peak...and I've got to redo that stitching along the edge of the porch on the right...then I'll be ready to work on the CQ frame.

On another note, and looking forward towards my next big project.....I found a new blogger who does a painting a day using oils. Manjiree's work just really speaks to me. I wrote her and asked her if I could use a few of her images to transfer onto fabric for my next project...which will be about gardens and the food we grow in them....and she graciously gave permission, also to letting me post some of her images here. Do visit her blog so you can see more of her work.
Thanks, Manjiree!!!

Won't they look FABULOUS in a crazy quilt?