My latest art quilt features a guinea. I love these funny looking birds; the pattern on their feathers reminds me of little old women wearing black calico dresses, and I love their spirit of self-confidence. I guess it should be noted that I admire them from a distance. I don’t think our neighbors would like for us to have them on our property.
My guineas must be relegated to quilts and buttons and such.
I found a black and white batik fabric a couple of years ago that said “guinea” to me. I made an album quilt of Sunbonnet Sue-style guineas and called it Guineas on Parade.
The art quilt here uses the same fabric and pattern I drew for that larger quilt. This one is needleturn appliquéd onto a brown and white checked background (more on the philosophy of that here). The sunflower in the border is raw edge appliqué on a brown hand-dyed fabric. All quilting is hand-guided, freemotion quilting using cotton thread.
This piece finishes at 16” x 20”. For the back, I used a delightful batik I bought in Paducah. Even though it’s on the back, it harkens to my philosophy of “using the good stuff“.
In addition to Guineas on Parade, I’ve included guinea buttons on a block in 52 Tuesdays, and an appliquéd guinea in 52 Wednesdays.
I found a delightful poem about guineas online. In part, it reads
They seldom walk –‘tis a run or a trot,
Snatching bugs left and right, one for each polka-dot.
The poem in its entirety can be found here.
When I see a guinea, or hear one, it takes me back to a sunny day of softball practice where the “buck-wheat” cry of these birds interrupted our practice. Those friends, the serenity of a spring day, the joy of playing in the rural outdoors, all come to mind and I feel a smile spreading across my face.
Kits to make quilts are wonderful. They are a great way to make a quilt if you don’t have a large fabric stash, if you aren’t comfortable selecting fabrics, or if you just want to jump right in with a ready supply of coordinated fabrics in the right colors. A good friend advises that they are great for travel or retreat projects, because they are packaged ready to sew on the go.
By then, I had learned both techniques of paper foundation piecing and needleturn appliqué. I love to do handwork and don’t like to travel with my sewing machine, so appliqué was the approach I used.
Quilt details: Finished size is 85” x 88”. The pattern is called The Quilted Village by the City Stitcher. Cotton fabrics, silk thread embroidery. Completed 2010. Cotton batting. Quilting thread DMC machine embroidery thread, two-ply, 50 weight cotton. Free motion quilted on home machine. Since there are lots of goat farms around Lake Hartwell, I made the label in the shape of a goat.
Happy Fourth of July from Bunk Bates. I don’t know who Bunk is, or even if he is a he or a she. But this photo has been a part of my life for as long as I can recall. It was in my Great Aunt Nellie’s photo album. The name “Bunk Bates” was scrawled across the bottom.
idered 48 French knots to represent stars, added some free motion quilting, and layered it atop a piece of an old quilt. I guess it represents my freedom from all the rules of quilting, because I followed few of them.
In February, I was quite busy with several demanding projects. Some of them kept me occupied at the computer, others at the sewing machine, preparing for our guild’s imminent quilt show. What I needed was some hand stitching to soothe my rattled nerves.
I found three colors I liked, chose a solid fabric for the background, and stitched them over a few evenings in front of the television. Recently, I layered the top with Dream Wool batting and a piece of hand-dyed fabric from Wendy Richardson as the back. I outlined the appliqué and stitched several rows of echo quilting using a variegated thread. The various edge designs; pebbles, straight lines, and continuous curves were stitched using a neutral color thread of the same weight.
This whole project was based on revisiting something I had liked from an earlier quilt. Four Little Pitchers was my entry in our guild’s annual challenge in 2009. The challenge was to make a four-block quilt. I drew the shapes of the pitchers based on some pieces from my pottery collection, used needleturn appliqué to stitch them to the black background, and separated the four blocks with a tiny (1/4”), subtle sashing of black with silver dots. Then I appliquéd the vine using the pattern from Emily Senuta’s basket book, and continued the design with the quilting motif. In that case, I continued the vine in green, then echoed all with a black thread.
The sashing turned out to be so tiny and so subtle that it became invisible, but I always liked the result of the vine motif and wanted to work with that design again. Especially after I began using wool batting, I wanted to use it to give extra dimension to the leaves in the quilted vines. The vine in the latest project is twice the size of the original pattern.
There is something soothing about the pulling of thread through cloth. I find myself out of sorts if days (okay, even one day) go by without some time spent stitching.
The top photo is one of me working on Blocks in Blue while staying at the Inn at Iris Meadows in Waynesville, NC. That quilt was hand pieced and machine quilted in 2005. It finished at 27” square, and was one of my early attempts at free motion machine quilting. I used invisible nylon thread in the top, a matching cotton thread in the bobbin.
Some of my quilting sisters think I’ve recently “gone to the dark side.” Now that I’m taking art classes with artist 
Further details of this quilt: This was early in my life as a hand-guided, freemotion machine quilter. I had previously used matching or transparent thread attempting to make my irregularities less noticeable. Here, for the first time, I dared to try the continuous curves using a heavier, contrasting thread. I marked a one-inch grid and used that as a guide. The border fabrics are batiks, the vine is a quilting-weight cotton cut on the bias, batting is Dream Cotton request, and threads are cotton.
Fun!
If I had known old ladies had so much fun, I would have aged faster.
I always love to take classes. Yes, I could have enjoyed being a professional student.
This photo is my unmarked free motion design from this afternoon. Red Mettler 50 weight cotton thread in the top, Aurafil 50 weight cotton in the bobbin. Echoing is done with 60 weight Kimono silk thread.
