Spring in the Columbia Gorge

Oh, one last thing before I go.....I really wanted to share this photo.
My friend Mitch Hammontree took this from the viewpoint of Cape Horn in the Columbia Gorge, not too far from where I live. This is what early spring looks like around here....turbulent!

But it is also sweet.....

My first flowers!
Yay, Spring!!!!
......Bye again..................

Rose Block

This is the fifth year that a group of us crazy quilters will create a quilt together that is donated to a cancer treatment center. Barbara Blankenship and Victoria Brown co-ordinate the project, which is an outgrowth of those great Art Bra calendars that Vicki produced in 2005,2006, and 2007 to raise money for breast cancer research.

This year's theme is "Roses"...we were all given a piece of rose colored dupioni to use in our blocks and then let loose to interpret the theme in an 8" X 8" block. (To see the other blocks being created this year which are totally fabulous, visit Barbara's Flickr page.)

This struck me as a great way to use my new millinery flower technique! My inspiration was the pink "Fairy Rose".

My block is pieced and ready to go. I've cut out petal shapes and am ready to light that flame to heat up my tools.

This really is so easy.

To create a bud, I used a small pre-made rosebud on wire for my stamen. Instead of gluing the petals on at the base, I just sewed them on one by one. That was much easier for me.
This picture shows me wrapping the wire stem with some nice green wool yarn.

(Sorry for the fuzzy shot.) I did use a little bit of glue on the leaves of the calyx, which was cut from some ultrasuede.

These vintage velvet leaves were a little too big, so I just cut them down to a better size.

I couched down the wrapped stems and just whipstitched the leaves on.
The top rose was sewn on like the bottom one, but I mooshed up one side and held it in place with the calyx which I tacked on over the flower's base, to get a different look. Those are rayon French knots in the center of the bottom rose.

I'll be taking this block to work on while I'm visiting my cousin Tracy in New Mexico over the next several days. Before we head up to the ranch, we're going to spend a little time in Santa Fe to attend a workshop together at the Bead Fest. Fun!

I'll be back in a week.....I don't think I'll be able to blog from there but if I can I will.
Otherwise....Adios, Amigas....

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....

Cottage CQ...Freddie

This quilt is about many things for me....the place I love best in the natural world, the cottage itself that houses so much of my family's history, my desire to push the envelope of what my crazy quilting can be.....but it is also about my brother, Freddie.

This picture of me and Freddie is from fifty years ago, taken several months before he died.
He drowned at Michillinda....

When a child dies, the cataclysms that result can go on and on in a family for decades. My family had its fair share of collateral devastation. Certainly my parents never recovered from this tragedy; their marriage ended two years later.

But many years have passed and the pain is gone now. Fortunately above all else, my sister was born before our parents divorced...

And the waves still lap the shore there, the sun still lights up the water and the woods, and we still find great joy on that porch, where such horrible news was delivered in July of 1958....that's part of the incredible blessing of a place like Michillinda. It absorbs all the drama of our little lives, it's unchanging beauty and rhythms give us a sense of perspective, and we have a polestar to refer to when all else is in flux....

So I had to write Freddie's name in the sand on the beach....

I can't tell you how wonderful it has felt for me to do this. Now the quilt is saying what it is meant to say in its entirety.

But as always with this quilt, there are technical problems!
When there are large sections of cloth and lots of embroidery, it is hard to keep everything flat...maybe I need a large quilting frame and could embroider the top as a whole on that, next time.
Anyway, some extra beading went onto the water section and it is now a bit puckery.

If you click on this, it will get bigger so you can see it better.
The grasses around Freddie's name aren't done yet. I've learned on this quilt that when I make a big change like this, I have to live with it for awhile before proceeding to refine it.
It will evolve, though...

I am hoping that when this is all done, when I re-interface the back I can pull it taught as I am fusing. That helps sometimes.

Thanks for all your kind comments on my last post....I've so appreciated the chance to share this long-haul project with you.
We're almost done!

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....

Class Samples...Finished

The kit components are assembled, the directions written, and the samples for my upcoming class on 3 D floral embellishments are all stitched.

Why did I make three samples, you might ask?
Because I want my students to make their own design decisions when embellishing their blocks. There is no one "right way" to go...so I thought I'd show some different approaches. I also wanted to give them a choice of which color kit to buy, and they need to visualize them in order to decide.

So here they are....

The white.....

The green.....

And the black.

Those cross stitch butterflies are from a pattern that my dear friend Pam Kellogg, of Kitty and Me Designs, created for me especially for this class. Thank you, Pam!
(For her fabulous cross stitch designs for crazy quilting, buy her book, Elegant Crazy Quilt Seam Treatments on Etsy.)

I enjoyed getting this class material together very much. There is so much that could be added to these blocks...especially beading. But my students will have to take it from here....

Next up for me is a different kind of 3 D flower construction, one I am HIGHLY excited about learning. I am waiting to get all my materials and tools together.....hopefully by Wednesday I'll be able to get started.
For a hint of what it's all about, look here....and stay tuned!