Even More Needlepunch Ribbon Flowers

I have made several more of these ribbon flower pins since the last time I posted about them.

Experimenting with different ribbon widths, adding other fibers, including different beads...creating these has been an ongoing quest.
And I finally figured out a way to "finish" them that I like!

They make nice gifts....

This one uses 13mm and 4mm RiverSilks ribbons, Krenik Soie Noppe thread and 6 ply silk floss, with some barely visible machine sewing thread in little loops in the center.

It became this:

The leaves are made from the hand-dyed felted wool I bought from Vicki Day in January.
This pin is a bit large for my taste, though. So I went smaller.

This one has simpler leaves and is smaller in diameter too. There are more beads incorporated as well. You can sew those on either after needlepunching the ribbon or before.

Next I tried sewing the leaves around the perimeter of the ribbon flower itself.

I like it, but they are a wee bit hard to see. Too subtle, I guess.

Larger leaves again, then.....

But they are nice and clean looking, of vintage lucite.

All these flowers were mounted over Timtex with an additional covered Timtex backing which worked well but felt cumbersome to me.
Then it finally occurred to me that covered button blanks could be ideal for this application. They come in sizes that are plenty big. So yesterday I tried that approach.

The button blank is 1 1/2". I've got a circle slightly larger than that drawn on my fabric in the hoop, to account for the curvature of the button blank. You can see my pearls are already sewn into place.

Fast forward to fitting the finished punched flower over the button form. I've removed that wire shank.

Using strong Silamead thread, I ran a gathering stitch around the trimmed perimeter of my punched fabric.

Then I cinched the gathers tightly, and took a few more stitches to get everything snug.
This picture doesn't show it, but next I used my fingers to push the fabric onto the prongs in the button form. That way it is easier to snap the button back over it into place.

And here is the lavender flower....

The leaves are a size I like, and the flower is held together quite securely and neatly by the covered button front and back. I just need to glue a pinback on it and it is all set to go on a lapel somewhere!

I'll be teaching how to make these flower pins at a private class arranged by a friend of mine in the Bay Area in May, and also at the Adventure in Crazy Quilting conference in Connecticut in April 2011.
This Adventure, produced by Maureen Greeson and Susan Elliot, with my co-teachers Betty Pillsbury and Sharon Boggon, promises to be a truly wonderful event for crazy quilters from around the country. Hope you can attend!

More Needlepunch Ribbon Flowers

My friend Freda was so nice to lend me her Dancing Needle. I purchased my own (here) so sent hers back with one of my flowers.
*edit* The large Dancing Needle--also known as the Ribbon Needle--this one.*

Freda is a very elegant lady (and as warm and sweet as she is beautiful) so I tried to make something she might enjoy.
I liked using the velvet millinery leaves a lot.

Then I tried to needlepunch some ribbon on needlepoint canvas, wanting to see if it would work...

For the larger ribbon it did, but I couldn't use anything smaller in the center. Sewing those beads on was easy, though.
I did like not having to use a hoop for this, and I think it will cut out and applique just fine on a quilt.

This one is about 3" wide.

The annual quilt retreat at Point Bonita is in a week! Because this marks its 30th year, we are all encouraged to make a challenge quilt, 18" X 18", to celebrate with the theme "Point Bonita, My Second Home". There should be some doozies. I'll post mine here when it is done...having some fun with it!

Needlepunch Flower Pin... A Tutorial

Continuing my experiments with the Dancing Needle, I made a couple of flower pins to give as last minute Christmas gifts. Or maybe I'll call them "New Year's Gifts"...yes, that's better!

I took pictures along the way so you could see how the process went. My biggest pleasure and discovery is that needlepunch allows for combining all kinds of fibers...and we crazy quilters definitely have big stashes of those to draw from.

There are 15 pictures in all, with the captions below each picture.

This is my initial "gathering" for one of the flowers. As you can see, fibers range from sewing machine thread to unspun thick silk to silk habotai meant for rotary cutting into 1" strips.

Using my smallest needle punch, I used three threads at once for the center of the flower, starting with the outline of the shape I wanted to fill in.

Nice! Along the outer edge of the circle I had taken out the darkest thread, so it looks lighter. Lots of fun color play is possible with this stuff!

Switching to a larger needle and increasing the length of the loops, I added unspun silk thread. Texture is another big variable to play with using this technique.

Fast forward....4mm and 7mm silk ribbon have gone on, along with more unspun silk. Here I am adding the silk habotai. I could have gone wider with the strips if I'd wanted to; this huge needlepunch still had plenty of "room" in it.

I was working on a blue and white flower, too. This picture is to show that you can add detail using fine threads after the fact of getting the bulky ribbon punched in.

Fast forward again. I've felted some silk and wool fibers onto green cotton flannel for my leaves and cut them out. The Timtex circles on the left are cut out to fit the backs of the flowers.

Here I am making a running stitch around the perimeter of the flower's base fabric, using beading thread for strength.

I pulled on the thread and it gathered pretty well. A few extra stitches here and there tightened things up.

The leaves have been embroidered and wire sewn onto their backs so they can be shaped. In this picture I have sewn on a backing of lightweight silk, leaving the bottom open. I trimmed the silk, turned the leaves, and sewed them onto the timtex on the backs of my flowers.

Two more Timtex circles were cut out and a pinback glued to each one.

I made slits in the ultrasuede to poke the ends of the pinback through, and then glued the ultrasuede onto the Timtex and to the back. Then I sewed this to the back of the flower, covering the ends of the leaves and giving a nice finish.

I also added a few beads around the edges of the leaves on this one.

So here is one of them....it could look great pinned to a black scarf...

This one I imagine worn on the lapel of a jean jacket...

I could keep playing with these but I have a UFO calling to me....it's been waiting for five years and the time is right. You'll see!.....

Vintage CQ...Flowers #29 and #30

Got them all done by Christmas!

#29 was another experiment with the Dancing Needle. This time I loaded it up with four 4mm silk ribbons at once, to get some very dense loops.
Really, it is so easy to achieve this much detail in almost no time at all.

This is supposed to be a marigold...the leaves were cut from silk that had been dunked in a 1 part glue/2 parts water solution. This acts to prevent the fabric from fraying, but the fabric is still cut and sewable. Easy peasy.

#30 was made from a lace motif hand dyed by Nicki Lee. I love her soft colors. I cut it up and rearranged things a bit, and added some small wired rim ribbon bells....

The biggest challenge with this 30 block series has been to fill that black diamond space in different ways. I think there were about four basic variations...

Now I get to play with arranging them all and then I will sew them together at last. I'll have to add more fly stitching to the new seams of course. That should take awhile...good busy work for airplane rides, of which there will be many for me in the coming year.

Meanwhile, after it is sewn together I will start making a new set of blocks to go around this center section. The ones from last summer didn't cut it! But that's fine, because I love to sew blocks.....

Dancing Needle Experiment

A reader named Allison left a comment on my last post that got me thinking...her point was that the Dancing Needle would go through a lot of 13mm silk ribbon to make a flower, implying that that could be pretty expensive.

So I thought, "Why not make my own "ribbon" out of 1/2" strips of very light weight silk? I know, we are veering into rug hooking territory here. Silk ribbon is in a class by itself, no doubt about that but still, there must be other ways to dance with that needle....

Different gauges of needles are required for different kinds of fibers. They make really tiny needlepunches, smaller than what I have here, for very fine fibers and detailed work.
I thought I'd try combining a few kinds and sizes of fibers for my flower experiment.

Also the length you set the depth of the needle in the needlepunch determines the length of the loop you will get. So that's another variable to play with.

With my rotary cutter I made these 1/2" strips of both silk chiffon and silk habotai. There is 4mm silk ribbon, 6 strand silk floss, and a combination of three finer threads that I wound together on an empty spool...

Here's a close up of the strips. Nothing fancy. They were cut with the grain, not on the bias. I'll bet one of those wavy edged rotary cutter blades would add some nice texture here...but no, that is a toy I don't have!

Here is my flower in the hoop, on green linen. Click so you can see it better...
Lots of potential here...and it doesn't have to cost a lot!

Vintage CQ...Flower #28

First I need to report about Andy's reception to "Love by the Moon" last week-end.
He showed me a picture on his phone of the beach where he and his gal love to walk....and it looked exactly like the beach in the piece I made. And I hadn't seen the picture.
We both thought that was pretty cool. He was happy.

On to my first adventures with the Dancing Needle....

(Sorry this picture is a little blurry.)
You can see I painted the center of where the flower will be..the color is much richer on the other side of the fabric. I used a slightly open weave linen to accommodate that huge needle. You have to try and poke it between the threads of the weave so you don't just destry the fabric as you punch. This fabric worked great.
I started with an inner ring of 4mm silk ribbon and then added two rings of the 13mm ribbon. That stuff from RiverSilks holds up so well.

Here it is still in the hoop. Such fluffiness!!!!

The extra fabric has been trimmed with an inch of margin all the way around, then tucked to the back and tacked into place.

When I placed it on a sample block, alas, it was too large.

So I made a smaller one. But first you have to see how I made some little leaves to go with it.

This is some of the Mokuba ribbon I love so much. I've gathered it by pulling out a thread on one edge of the ribbon.

Then I got out my handy dandy and indispensable Thread Zapper to seal the cut ends of the ribbon. You push that button on the side and it heats up that little wire tip. (There's a AA battery in there.) You just run it over the cut edges of the ribbon and it seals them right up, with a satisfying wisp of smoke.

The sealed ends won't ravel and hold the gather in place. Very slick! (I just Googled "Bead Smith Thread Zap" and you can find it on Ebay here.)
So then I made a lot of these, using up almost a yard's worth of ribbon, and sewed them onto my block. Over them went my smaller, pre-made needle punched flower.

I added another row of 4mm ribbon by hand around the outside edge of the flower after it was sewn on. It just seemed like it needed it.
The beads in the center add a little sparkle and keep the flower secured into place.
The green detached chain stitches on either side just added some air.

Here's a close-up of the flower...

Couldn't you just fill up a whole quilt with these? I could!!!

Vintage CQ...Flower #27

Needlepunch!
What a great technique it is for creating three dimensional flowers. For Flower #27 of the Vintage CQ I decided to try needlepunch with 4mm silk ribbon.

Because I couldn't ''punch'' directly onto one of my blocks (you have to keep the punching surface very taut in a hoop and the block was too small for that), I punched into a tightly woven cotton black fabric that I could then applique onto my block.
The above picture shows three flower centers punched with 6 strand cotton floss...with the needle punch adding the 4mm silk ribbon.

Here is how it looks on the other side of the hoop. Those ribbon loops were so quick and easy to form!

And here is the finished block:

I stitched on some of that pre-fab leaf trim you can buy (after I dunked it into some "Sulpher Green" Dye-Na-Flow and let it dry).
Then I cut out my three flowers, folded under the margin of black fabric around them, and stitched them into place.

This block is so top heavy and wonky! Really, it must have been one of the first ones I made, as the black star is so asymmetrical. I tried to compensate for that with the shape of the flower...I just didn't want to redo the whole block at this stage of the game! (My bad....)

My dear friend Freda B has lent me the use of her "Dancing Needle". It is a needlepunch tool especially designed for using WIDE 7mm and 13mm ribbon.

This tool looks positively lethal, doesn't it? We used to give our cows IVs for milk fever with needles that were not nearly this big!
But it could make a really awesome Vintage Flower #28.... We'll try that next!

International Quilt Festival, Long Beach.....A Report

I had a terrific time with my blogging buddies in Long Beach, California!
The picture below is dark, sorry....but there are Barbara, me, Debra, and Rian, about to be served our lunch after a long morning at the show for them, and in class for me. We cleaned our plates, let me assure you....

Our time together was everything I knew it would be...so full of easy and stimulating friendship, lots of stitching talk, and late night storytelling in our pajamas, all of us sharing one big hotel room. What a great gift, for us bloggers to get to spend time together...

I only had one class with Paula Scaffidi, a mere three hours, but it would have been worth the entire trip to Long Beach just for that.
Entitled "Luscious Fruit", the workshop taught how to create three-dimensionally shaded felted fruits, for applique or needlefelting onto textile projects (could be wearables, too, as these items were constructed to be washable).
I am an ethical blogger, so will not post step by step pictures of how I made my fruit...Paula worked hard to put together a class that was just aces....and she deserves to be paid for her great information.
Visit her website to see pictures of the incredible work she does.

I will say that one of the reasons her presentation was so strong was that she made optimal use of her PowerPoint capabilities. As we went through the steps of creating our fruits, she would tell her helper, "Lights down!" and present clear sequential pictures on a big screen of the technique she wanted us to learn next. She even had videos embedded in the Powerpoint that showed her doing what we were supposed to do...again, these were perfectly in sequence so that the class just flowed.
I truly think the efficiency this gave us all allowed her to present much more content than a normal 3 hour class.

Here is a sample screen shot I took from my seat. This shows how to lay out our roving to make a more rounded looking shape.

When a question came up, she had her flipboard all ready to illustrate her answers.

And here is my class project, after 3 hours....

The piece of inner brocade background is 9" X 12", to give you an idea of the scale and size. My little cherries don't have their stems yet, and I need some more velvet leaves.....
I can't wait to finish this!
Paula says she has a book coming out next year, and she intends to include a DVD with it that will illustrate her techniques the way she used videos in class. This is so innovative, don't you think? Her book will set the standard for needlefelting, of this I have no doubt.
Thank you, Paula!


Speaking of standard-setting books, on the flights down and then back home, I had the enjoyment of reading Cindy Brick's new one, Crazy Quilts: History, Techniques, Embroidery Motifs. (It is available on Amazon, but the first printing is almost sold out. A second printing is due to ship by mid-August. You can order it from her website, of course, which is actually better because I think she gets more profit that way!)
I found it to be a very classy production. It is informative, written in an engaging style, and with lots of pictures of wonderful quilts. The printing and production of the book itself is of very high quality. Cindy includes some new techniques to try when making your own crazy quilt, as well as the tried and true traditional methods.
There will be more about this book in an upcoming review in CQMagOnline.

From my reading I felt much more informed about what I was looking at when Debra, Rian and I happened upon a very fine pile of crazy quilts from the 1880's at a vendor's booth. I was allowed to take some pictures of my favorite CQ element...fans!

I love how narrow these fan blades are. These are the exact same colors I used for the fans in my "H" quilt....I was going for this look, as you can see:

Pretty cool that I actually got that right!
Here are some more of the fans from that quilt in the booth....

So nice....

And here is a detail shot....

I include this because it shows how the stitcher very cleverly solved a big problem with these narrow-bladed fans. The seam treatments get really smashed into each other in the little round corner, because of course the seams are so close together there.
Look what this lady did: she provides stitching detail on the seams, but it is not continuous. The eye reads it as such, but really there are just dots and singly spaced Turkey Track stitches that suggest lines of stitching.
I'm going to remember that one...

But what of the quilts hanging in the show?
Alas, what was there was pretty much a retread of what won in Chicago and Houston, with a TON of journal quilt pages on display. The same art quilt exhibit from Studio Art Quilt Associates, the same Tactile Architecture quilts, the same almost everything. Not that there wasn't some outstanding work there, but overall I found this rehash quite disappointing.

But between hanging with my good buddies, studying with Paula, reading Cindy's book and also getting some quality time with my father-in-law while staying with him in Manhattan Beach last night....it was a terrific trip.
Always good to be home, though!
Let's hope they do better next year and include a competition.