adventures of a quilting diva

Today’s tip is for free-motion machine quilting and it comes from The Quilting Arts Book: Techniques and Inspiration for Creating One-of-a-Kind Quilts, by Patricia Bolton, a great book full of ideas, projects and tips for making artistic quilts. From principles of design to sketching to quilting and embellishment techniques to gorgeous quilts, The Quilting Arts Book is full of art quilt inspiration.

In it Robbi Joy Eklow, Quilting Arts Magazine’s Goddess of the Last Minute shares her free-motion machine quilting technique and tells how to make 16 fun free-motion quilting designs. She gives many tips as well. My favorite is, “This is not billiards, in which you have to say what you plan to do before you try to do it. If you are striving for a motif and it morphs into another shape, go with it.”

happy quilting (whatever shape it may turn out to be)! =(^_^)=

Why not choose a line from a favorite book to inspire your next quilt? Here’s my quilt, Goodnight Moon, from the book Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, inspired by the line, “In the great green room there was a telephone” I’m sure many of you, like me, could recite most if not all of that book from memory if it was one of the bedtime stories you read to your children each night. Children’s books are particularly full of inspiring word pictures (and they have fantastic illustrations as well in case you need a little extra boost of eye candy to feed your muse.)

I love Clement Hurd’s charming illustrations, especially that stylish old phone, the kind with the real dial for dialing (no buttons or voice recognition!) and that wonderful curly cord. As you turn the pages it really does get darker and darker in that quaint little house. Here’s my fabric interpretation of that phone.

I also like the line, “Goodnight nobody. Goodnight mush.” That always made me smile. Hmmm … I wonder what a quilt about mush would look like?

And here’s the back of my quilt. You can really see the quilting. (except nobody’s getting ANY sleep with this noisy phone!) Click here for more great book challenge quilts from my fellow quilters at Fast Friday Fabric Challenge. And browse through your bookshelf or local library for a little quilty inspiration.

because we all could use a little inspiration every now and then …
The other day I was cooking dinner and just loved the way the veggies looked so bright and cheery in the pan. If my family didn’t need to eat, I just might have set the dinner preparations aside and gone straight to my studio. Instead I settled on a digital photo and postponed the studio session.

Those vegetables have a great color scheme, very warm and inviting. From traditional to folk art to contemporary, all kinds of quilt patterns would look marvelous in these colors (not just food-related ones).

Or get your sketchbook out and draw some veggies. (A farmer’s market would make a great field trip for this.) Detailed, stylized or even abstract. See the circles, half-circles, rectangles, triangles and diamonds in that pan? Make some vegetable appliqué blocks or even some veggie borders.

If the thought of drawing makes you break out in hives, don’t worry. Ruth B. McDowell has a great quilting book, Pieced Vegetables. What’s specially wonderful is that there are patterns for both straight seams and curved seams for all the veggies in Ruth’s book.

I still have that pepper quilt on my mind, and there are 4 different pepper patterns in Pieced Vegetables! The tomato and pumpkin blocks are adorable too. There are a lot of great suggestions for fabric choices and block layouts. Maybe I’ll have to quilt an entire salad! =(^_^)=

Boston Lettuce pattern from Pieced Vegetables by Ruth B. McDowell
made by Violet Vaughnes

Last week I attended a workshop from Peggy Martin, Quick-Strip Paper Pieced New York Beauty. Click here to see some of the many variations you can get by laying out the blocks in different patterns. Definitely half the fun comes when you finish the blocks and get to play with them, trying out different arrangements.

Here is one of the blocks I worked on in the class. The pink fabric in the corner is actually not sewn down yet, I just laid it on top for the photo, and unfortunately did not lay it down very accurately. When you do sew the pieces together you really get nice sharp points, as you can see with the yellow points above, which are sewn down.

What’s great about Peggy’s Quick-Strip paper piecing technique is that it really is quick and easy! And you get 3 different methods to choose from to sew the curved lines (something for everybody!). I’ve started 8 blocks but haven’t decided how many there will be in the end.

This is my focus fabric for my New York Beauty quilt, “margarita” from Alexander Henry Fabrics, 2004. I’ve been saving it for just the right quilt. I have enough of it to use in a border and to sprinkle throughout some of the blocks.

Peggy’s trunk show was amazing as well! I love how she uses such a wide variety of colors and fabrics from quilt to quilt. I was fascinated to see how just a single small change to a quilt block (line, color, value, orientation, etc.) makes all the difference in the world in the final quilt’s look and feel. Check out the different looks you can get with the traditional Palm Leaf block. The cover quilt of Quick-Strip Paper Piecing: For Blocks, Borders & Quilts (Peggy’s book with the New York Beauty pattern in it) is one of those quilts you really have to see in person.

Stay tuned for more of my New York Beauty blocks! (and I promise to sew all the pieces together for you next time) =(^_^)=

Last week I attended the African Folklore Embroidery workshop and Safari through African Folklore Embroidery lecture by Leora Raikin. It was refreshing, fun, educational and entertaining. Leora grew up in South Africa and learned African Folklore Embroidery from her mother.
The authentic designs are drawn by village women in South Africa and printed onto a sturdy black cotton fabric.
The variegated threads come in the most delicious colorfast colors, and are hand-dyed in South Africa. Different color dyes are poured onto the threads every two inches with a teaspoon, giving a wonderful range of colors in even a short length of thread. What is great is that the employment opportunities created by the market for these beautiful threads has enabled many women to move from shack housing to regular housing with running water and electricity.
The Ndebele tribe has many other wonderful handicrafts, such as this beaded Ndebele Ceremonial doll. You can add beads and other fun stuff to your embroidery as well.
Here is the very charming African Folklore piece that I am working on. The first rule of African Folklore Embroidery is that any color you choose is the right color. And with so many gorgeous colors to pick from, you can’t go wrong!
My daughter Annika chose a cute hippo, and declared the chain stitch used in African Folklore embroidery to be very easy. Picking just one design is what is hard.
African Folklore Embroidery kits, hand-dyed House of Embroidery threads, and Leora Raikin’s book, Safari Through Africa Folklore Embroidery (which covers embroidery, beading, and other wonderful embellishment techniques) are all available at the African Folklore Embroidery site. Or visit Leora’s blog for African safari photos and adventures.

In January I took the Bella Bella workshop from Norah McMeeking. It was fun and I learned a lot of good tips about paper foundation piecing. My paper piecing skills have really improved the past few months and I can make good blocks without stitching down too-small pieces or wasting exorbitant amounts of fabric.

Here is my latest basket pattern, Easy Peasy Paper Pieced Baskets. You can find it at the Citrus Belt Quilters’ Block of the Month page. (If any of you make a quilt from one of my basket patterns, email me a photo so I can post it here on my blog.)

Anyways, back to Bella Bella, and some much larger paper pieced quilts designed from Italian Mosaic floors.
I liked this Bella Bella quilt because of the black and white.
Here is the same pattern four different ways. One of the most interesting things about taking the workshop was seeing all the different fabrics that people put together. Perhaps I spent a little too much time checking out what other students were doing because here is my Bella Bella quilt.
And I found out after I got home that I’m not even done with the cutting yet. I need to choose one more color for the rainbow stack to make 12 different fabrics. Maybe next month I’ll work on my Bella Bella for 10 minutes every day.

happy quilting!

For those of you who are members at The Quilt Show, have you been following the Rhapsody Reality Blog, where Ricky Tims is posting the whole process of making a Rhapsody Quilt? (To see what a Rhapsody Quilt is, visit Ricky Tim’s website gallery.)

I’ve decided to try to make one along the way. Above are my first computer sketches (made with Adobe Illustrator software). The top two are from the same half-square-triangle drawing, copied, reflected and rotated, and the bottom two from a second half-square-triangle drawing, also copied, reflected and rotated. On the left are the original triangles that the squares came from.

My plan was to make a pair of Rhapsody Quilts from the same half-square-triangle drawing and hang them together, as their looks are quite different, even though they came from the same drawing. The top pair is interesting on its own, but wouldn’t have as much room as the bottom pair for all the appliqué. For now though, I’ll just start with one and see how it goes. I’m sure it’s a very time-consuming project. As for which one to make first, it will probably be one of the bottom squares. They’re simpler than the top ones, and I don’t have a whole lot of experience with that sort of curved piecing.

If any of you Quilt Show members are inspired, why don’t you try making a Rhapsody Quilt as well.

happy quilting!

Recently I got a new cell phone and didn’t have a case the right size to keep it in. Somehow, going to Wal-Mart and picking up a ho-hum case just didn’t seem right for my up-to-the-minute phone (which I am lucky to even be able to turn on and off and dial the numbers). I needed a case that was as cool as … no make that cooler than, my phone.

So this weekend, inspired by Kumiko Sudo’s wonderful book, Kokoro no Te: Handmade Treasures from the Heart and a glorious sliver of vintage Japanese rayon fabric, here we are: a cell phone pouch fit for a queen! Kumiko’s Camellia Cozy had some wonderful wool felt and silk embellishments, but I couldn’t bear to cover up that much of the fabric, it was perfect as it was, so I simply added a variety of beads for fun. And it fit my phone perfectly, as if she had designed the pattern with my model in mind.

I’d been waiting for well over a year for the right project to use this fabric on as well as most of the beads and the rice pearls. The book I’d only purchased the day before. Kumiko’s books are full of wonderful eye candy. I’ve had Folded Flowers: Fabric Origami with a Twist of Silk Ribbon and Flower Origami: Fabric Flowers from Simple Shapes for several years and never tire of flipping through the pages and admiring her unique take on fiber art. I’d buy anything Kumiko Sudo’s written on the basis of her name alone.