I’m still here; sewing, just not posting…but here’s some stitching to share.
I have long admired the quilting work of Cindy Needham. Many times, she enhances her amazing quilting with fresh water pearls.
I needed a purse for my grandson’s wedding, had a bit of cotton fabric I had dipped in the walnut dyepot…it matched my shoes exactly.
So I gathered a few of Cindy’s stencils I had purchased, reread her instructions, and modified a zippered bag tutorial from Jenny Doane at Missouri Star Quilts.
I used wool batting and silk thread. It was fun!
A view of the bag closed.
With the flap open, you see I used clamshells, wavy lines, and pebbles on this portion.
And the view from the backside with the purse opens shows the cathedral window quilting that wraps from the front to the back of the bag.
People often ask, “how long does it take to make a quilt?” There’s usually no way to answer that…but this one was 20 years in the making. I pieced the blocks long ago, pulled them out in February and presented the quilt as a gift early in May.
I learned a lot about quilting at the turn of the century watching the then HGTV series, Simply Quilts. On that show, a line of fabric designed by Susan Branch was featured with this pieced combination of Lemoyne Stars and half-Lemoyne stars. I was entranced. Entranced by Susan Branch’s art work, by the fabric, by the star pattern.
I bought the line of fabric in fat quarters, downloaded the show’s pattern, and began piecing stars by hand. They were lovely. I enjoyed many hours of piecing the stars while visiting with family and friends.
Then they sat in a box for years. Many years. I had memories of laying out the blocks on the design wall, labeling their position in a spreadsheet array, and putting them aside. I thought it was a failed project because the white background fabric was so thin that it wouldn’t work to assemble them.
I opened the box earlier this year to learn that I was wrong. I had put them away because the solid white blocks were the wrong size to connect with the stars. Whether I read the directions incorrectly, pieced incorrectly, or whether there was an error in the instructions, I don’t know. Fortunately the solid blocks were too big, not too small. All the stars were consistently the same size, so I just trimmed the solid blocks to fit and stitched them together. They went together perfectly. Well, there are a few less than perfect points…but let’s chalk that up to an inexperienced piecer stitching them by hand.
Twenty years of experience gave me the knowledge I needed to make the blocks work.
Here are the blocks on the design wall in February. The box on the apron of the sewing machine is where they lived for years.
As I thought about a quilting design, the obvious was to quilt feathered wreaths in the open spaces. That seemed too pretentious to me for these fun fabrics. I wanted a curvy design to contrast with the pointy stars. So I stitched an overall vine in green thread, then echoed it in a fine white thread. I like the result.
Here you see I marked a suggested path for the vines with a wax pencil (removable with a hot iron). You also see that I do not feel compelled to follow those lines very carefully.
I called this one Celebration. It was given to a family member who had reason to celebrate…but I was celebrating the completion of a big UFO! I considered calling it WooHoo, but went with the more discreet name.
This full view was taken with a drone…a great way to photograph a quilt without a sleeve.
The quilt measures 80” square. I’m pleased with the green vines on back and front, echoed with a finer thread in white. The green is a 30wt cotton thread. The white is a 100 wt silk.
I loved that this outdoor image captured the shadow of real leaves on my quilted leaves.
The on-location photos were taken at a rescued country store, Mildred’s, in Houston County.
I don’t visit quilt shops much anymore. I have plenty of fabric on hand and I really love using the vintage fabric more than commercially produced quilt fabric. But the new lines of fabric are sometimes irresistible and I have a new quilt to prove that.
On a visit to a local quilt shop in search of border fabric for a project, a glorious panel of fabric caught my eye. Flowers in a jar….my favorite kind of arrangement. Simple. Pure. Country Life. I bought it along with a couple of yards of coordinating fabric for the back. My thoughts were, “I’ll just baste this with batting, sit down and quilt it and have a quick lovely quilt.” Right.
I came home and looked up the fabric online (Adel in Autumn by Sandy Gervais) just to see what others had done with it. I stumbled on a blogpost by piccolo studio.com and saw her quilt. Oh, my! I had to do my version of that.
I love raw edges in my art pieces, but not so much in traditional quilts. And, I am not a fan of fusible appliqué. But that seemed the only way to go with this.
After days of laborious cutting, I was ready to attach it to my background (pieced with an inner border of the coordinating fabric), and quilt.
I did free motion machine appliqué on the flowers and vase first, to secure all layers. I planned to echo the design all the way to the edges, but filling all that negative space was going to result in nearly straight lines near the edge. So I added more stems and leaves and berries in the center to echo around, giving more bumps and curves for detail in the quilting.
I used some 30 wt threads both on the appliqué and in the added stems. Echo quilting is done with 100 wt silk thread. In this photo, you see that even with the added stems for echo quilting, I resorted to my irregular freemotion grid to complete the quilting to the edges.
When it came time to add a label, it was obvious. I had this sweet multicolored dotted fabric that looked like the contents of a canning jar. I used watercolor crayons to paint the lid and add some shading on the sides of the jar (more about painting on fabric here).
This quilt went with us on a recent outing to nearby state parks. It was quite showy in the fresh air…just like the flowers depicted on it.
The quilt is a large wall hanging, or lap quilt. It measures 48″ x 53″.
