Category Archives: my finished quilts

crayon fun!

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Spring by Laura West Kong

A quilt for Earth Day! Spring was made using the Waxmelter Batik Pen, a fun and green way to use up broken crayon bits. (You wouldn’t want those broken crayons to go to waste, now would you?)

Broken crayons go in the top …

(This is the Waxmelter Batik Pen)

…melted wax comes out the bottom.

(The art comes from YOU!)

Color inside the wax-outlined shapes with thin, flowing paints such as watered-down acrylics, silk fabric paint, etc. or dip it into some cold-water fabric dye. The crayon wax acts like a resist to keep the paint where it belongs.

After the fabric dries you can remove the wax by ironing the fabric between sheets of newsprint or paper towels. The heat of the iron melts the wax and the paper soaks it up. The colored lines stay behind! Or if you’re not going to wash it, you can leave the wax right where it is. The wax lines give a neat dimensional element for an art quilt. You can melt regular batik wax, too. I’ve also decorated Easter eggs with my batik pen. Find out more about the Waxmelter Batik Pen and other wax melting tools at the Wax Melting Tools by Twisteez Wire website.

About Crayons
You probably don’t want to use those free restaurant crayons in your batik pen. Some of them got mixed up in my broken crayon box. See the difference below:

Notice the blue and green lines on the left. See the clear areas in the lines and lack of complete color coverage? That because cheap crayons don’t have as much pigment as better quality crayons do. Good crayons have more pigment and will give you bright, clear colors on paper as well as on fabric. The batik pen is easier to use with good crayons too. Sometimes the cheap crayon wax is really thin when melted and can flood out of the tip. The red and blue lines on the right probably didn’t come from children’s menu crayons. If I were to remove the wax off the samples above, the one on the left would certainly leave a greasy stain behind.

If you want some really fabulous crayons, try Prang Soy Crayons. The paraffin wax in regular crayons comes from petroleum, these are made from soy. They’re environmentally friendly, that’s why I’m telling you about them on Earth Day. But that’s not why I LOVE them … I love them because they are smooth, rich, and vibrant. They’re creamy and blend-able without a waxy buildup. I use mine for those cute vintage-y picture quilts that are hand embroidered with a stem stitch and then colored in the lines with crayons.

My Crayon Kitty. I should really finish up the rest of these blocks. Maybe I’ll make that my Earth Day project!

Share your comments or Earth Day projects!

More Eco-Posts!
Tip Tuesday: Give Blood … Get Thimbles
Muse Monday: Quilt A Memory
Bottle Cap Pincushion
Quilt Green 2009
Quilt-Cycle

breezy

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Here’s a quilt I started in 2006, Breezy. It was a challenge quilt for FFFC and was supposed to take a week to finish. This was one of those “my eyes are bigger than my stomach” situations. It actually took more like 4 years to complete, mostly because I was hand appliqueing the wool felt petals with a few too many strands of rayon embroidery floss … if 1 strand is good, 4 strands are better, right? ;-)

Breezy
by Laura West Kong

So last fall I took it out of the UFO hangar, finished up the remaining hand applique and proceeded on to a much more enjoyable step: hand sashiko quilting with topstitching thread. Now I’m sharing the photos with you. Hope that it brightens your day!

Breezy, detail

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tip tuesday: a cuppa beads

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Here’s a simple (hopefully not too obvious) tip for today: When embellishing your quilt top with beads, it’s better to wait until after you quilt it before you sew the beads on. It’s impossible to machine quilt around the beading and not much fun to hand quilt either. Ask me how I figured this one out. ;-)

:-D happy beading!

A Cuppa Beads
©2010 by Laura West Kong

quilting with kaffe

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Finally finished! You might remember the sneak peak of this quilt way back from summer 2009. (Read the post from July 15, 2009)

The pattern is The Gift by Brandon Mably, found in the book, Kaffe Fassett’s Country Garden Quilts. I made this quilt for a book report at my guild. Now I’m not going back to school and presenting you with a formal book report, but I will tell you a few things about Country Garden Quilts: The whole first third of the book is chock full of gorgeous photos of vibrant quilts that look like they just sprouted out of magnificent gardens (set at Great Dixter in Sussex, a 15th-century English manor). It’s enough to just sit back in a comfortable chair and flip through the pages. Pour yourself a glass of lemonade and enjoy!

If you must break out the needle and thread, this book is more than just eye candy. There are clear instructions, great tips, full views of the quilts, alternate colorways and suggestions for quilting. Projects are divided into easy, intermediate and difficult. I really like that with not just one, but a whole team of quilt designers, you get a wide variety of styles to choose from. Mostly pieced, but a bit of applique as well.

I chose The Gift not only because it was so charming, but because it combined fusible applique with the piecing. A little secret: I made my version at half-size, 13.5″x16.5″ because I didn’t want to take the time to find a copy machine and enlarge the pattern pieces. It worked splendidly right out of the book, and the math to reduce the block sizes was quick and easy to do. I included some of the Kaffe fabrics from my stash, as well as some other prints that I thought were in keeping with the overall feel and scale of the original. I hand-quilted it with salmon pink thread like the original, and added hot-fix crystals for a touch of bling.

I wholeheartedly recommend Kaffe Fassett’s Country Garden Quilts, whether for actual quilt-making or simply the sheer beauty of the book.

Speaking of Kaffe quilt books, I’m reminded of Kaffe Fassett Patchwork: Over 25 Glorious Quilt Designs, one of the very first quilt books I ever owned. One of the very first quilted objects I ever made uses several of the quilt blocks from this book as well (including that glorious cover quilt) … but that’s another story for another day.

magritte and me

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Here’s my latest quilt, “Magritte and Me” (17″x23″). I created it for the FFFC Challenge #46, Geology with Unexpected Color.

I really love working with the little paintbrush strokes of fabric. It’s relaxing and fun to do and I like the way it turns out. I have several more ideas for this method of fusible applique quilt that I want to try.

Here’s a detail shot of the castle. This quilt is completely in hand dyed fabric. There are 3 different hand dyed whites. Painters will tell you that there is a difference between white paints and it’s the same with white fabric. Once it’s cut up into bits, you can’t always tell which is which until you place them side by side. Then you can easily see this one is a blue white, that one is a yellow white, and the other is a pink white.

I originally painted the reproduction below  for an exercise in a painting class. My reference was one of those little color plates in a fine art book. Remember when fine art books had those sections of color plates in the middle? If you were actually reading the text you always had to flip back and forth between the pages to see what the author was talking about. You can see a print of the original Le Chateau Des Pyrenees by Rene Magritte on Amazon.

I’m not sure what Magritte’s meaning of The Castle in the Pyrenees is. I read somewhere that he made it for a friend. I liked the image well enough to stare at it for hours on end while working on it, so I chose it for my original assignment and once again for this challenge.

“To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.” ~ René Magritte

no paints were harmed in the making of this quilt

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Earlier this month I went to a guild meeting and saw a lecture by Tammie Bowser (www.mosaicquilt.com). She’s the one who does those fabulous photo quilts that are made up of pixels of fabric. You could say I got bit by the picture quilt bug so I tried my hand at a picture quilt of my own. But I didn’t want to use pixels. I was thinking more along the lines of brush strokes of fabric.

Coincidentally while reorganizing my studio I came across this acrylic study I did some 20 years ago. Like a quilter warming up on a practice sandwich before stitching on the real quilt, painters also warm up before hitting the real canvas. When I found it I knew immediately what the subject of my picture quilt would be.

And here’s the final result. It’s done with random pieces of fabric stuck to Lite Steam A Seam 2 on a fusible interfacing background. (My personal preference for this kind of quilt is the Lite, but Regular Steam A Seam 2 works in a pinch.) It’s completely done with fabric. No paints, inks, or thread were used to add detail. I quilted the picture part with invisible thread so it would give texture and hold the layers together without altering the colors of the fabric.

No Paints Were Harmed in the Making of This Quilt
©2010 by Laura West Kong

I was so charmed by this quilt that I started another one just a few days later. Unfortunately in the process I used up my complete supply of both Lite and Regular Steam A Seam 2, so quilt #2 is at a standstill for now. Considering that the lecture was less than 2 weeks ago and I’ve already finished 1-1/2 picture quilts, you shouldn’t have to wait very long for me to finish the second quilt once I get to the store.

The second quilt is also from an already painted study, but when I’m finished with that one I plan on doing a real-life still life directly with fabric as if I were painting, no photography. There’s something special about working from still life and live models that you don’t get from photographic references. I don’t know what it is, but I miss it.

In a way it’s a good thing that I ran out of all my Steam A Seam 2. Otherwise I would have been tempted to stick Steam A Seam 2 onto my entire stash and cut it all up into random pieces. Then I wouldn’t be able to make any other kinds of quilts. I suppose I could go fabric shopping then, and I would have a grand selection of fabric “paint”, so that wouldn’t be all bad.

happy quilting! ^_^

bead-dazzled bindings!

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binding-blingBecause every binding should be fantabulous, check out my Easy Lesson article in the April/May 2010 issue of Quilters Newsletter Magazine, Bead-Dazzled Bindings.

Find out how to make the embellished binding in my Zéphirine Drouhin and Latte quilts (Latte shown at right). Or take my new workshop, Bling Your Bindings! and learn eight fun embellished binding techniques.

If you’re looking for the QNM Online Extra step-by-step photos of my silk dyeing adventures, click here.

muse monday: inspired by … deadlines!

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There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned looming deadline to jump start a person’s creativity. As you can see below, my African Folklore Embroidery, A Beadiful Day, is finally completed and ready to take a road trip {to Road to California that is}.beadiful-dayGenuine deadlines work better than fake ones, but in the absence of a real deadline it can’t hurt to make one up anyways.

If you’re in the neighborhood, drop by and visit the African Folklore Embroidery exhibit at Road to California, January 14-17, 2010 in Ontario, California. To learn more about African Folklore Embroidery visit the African Folklore Embroidery website.

muse monday: dreams of thailand

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In 2005 I created this quilt, Thai Dreamin’, for the Hancock Fabrics/St. Jude Hospital Quilt of Dreams contest. It was inspired by a patient’s dream to go to Thailand. Another inspiration was Japanese Manga-style comics. Can you tell that I dream in color?

The top panel is riding an elephant in Chiang Mai and the bottom panel is of flying kites in Sanam Luang (a park in Bangkok).

This quilt is double-sided and has a map of Thailand appliqued on the back.

The deadline for this year’s Quilt of Dreams contest has already passed, but there’s no reason why you still can’t make a dream quilt. Choose a dream of your own or of someone you love and design a special dream quilt.

Or mark your calendar for the 2010 Quilt of Dreams contest because the new Quilt of Dreams fabrics and brochure will be out early next year. Plan to make and donate a Quilt of Dreams. All quilts entered are given to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital patients or sold by auction. More than 15,000 quilts have already been donated and nearly $5 dollars raised by Quilt of Dreams over the past seven years.

Click here for more about this quilt.

tip tuesday: from doodle to appliqué

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Tiny doodles are not only fun to draw, they’re great for appliqué designs because when you’re drawing something very small, there’s not a lot of room for fussy details. That makes for easy appliqué. At left are several doodles I drew for appliqué blocks. You could fit all three of these drawings together on a Post-It note with room to spare.

When you’ve drawn a couple of doodles you like, just enlarge them to your desired size on the computer or a photocopy machine. I scan them at high resolution, then enlarge and clean them up in Photoshop, or sometimes use Illustrator and auto-trace them into vector artwork. Simple image-editing computer programs will do the trick as well. You don’t need the enlarged drawings to be picture perfect unless you are planning to publish the patterns.

After you’ve enlarged them to your desired size, you can print them out. If the lines are very pixelated or fuzzy from the enlarging process, use a lightbox or tape the paper to a sunny window and trace the design onto a new piece of paper.

If you are going to use paper-backed fusible web for your appliqués, remember to reverse the image in your computer program, photocopy machine, or flip it over and trace from the reverse side when you trace it onto a new sheet of paper after printing. That way the design won’t be backwards when you iron the fusible web onto your fabric.

Here are the results of the coffee cup doodles (I haven’t made any quilts from the cupcake doodle yet):

I Love You More Than … is based loosely on the small cup in the top left. I decided to simplify the cup even further by changing it to a straight-on perspective and added the stylized heart-shaped steam. The steam doodles are probably in a sketch pad or another computer someplace.

Latte is the pattern I made from the “large” coffee doodle on the right. I really like this cup and made quite a few variations of it. I seem to have forgotten about the swirly steam. I should make a block with the steaming cup. Maybe I could put the cupcake next to it.

The cup quilt on the left was probably supposed to be a cup of water. Come to think of it, that fabric reminds me of bubbles. It could be sparkling water.

The cup quilt on the right is A Cuppa Beads. Both of these cups are somewhere in my UFO hangar. I was using the cup of water as a demo piece for teaching bead embroidery so it’s not very far along, but A Cuppa Beads is probably ready for a border and quilting.

Below is a detail of the original Latte wallhanging. You will see more of this quilt in early 2010.
Happy doodling! =(^_^)=