adventures of a quilting diva

Here’s an autumn leaf UFO from fall 2006. Or maybe those are autumn flowers, I can’t remember. It’s my own original design so it can be anything I want it to be.

Either way, the top is nearly complete. The hand-dyed cotton petals are all machine appliqued and the solid wool felt petals are hand appliqued and beaded. I still need to finish the applique on a few of the wool petals. Then I’m going to do some sashiko-style hand quilting in the background.

I’ve finished the machine quilting on my Candy Hearts Baskets quilt. Can you believe it? This quilt is now ready for binding. Just think, on Sunday it wasn’t even basted yet. Here’s how the blocks turned out.

And I’m nearly done with my African Folklore Embroidery. Time to start dreaming of what I want to do with it when the embroidery is finished. I already have a few ideas simmering.

Stay tuned to see what happens next! <:3)~

Here’s a knitted purse I’ve been working on. This is two skeins of hand-dyed self-striping wool yarn (Noro Kureyon) before the felting, a bit over 17″ x 14″. It was so much fun to knit, seeing the different color stripes appear like magic.

After the felting I got a very interesting shape. It shrank approximately an inch in both directions at the corners, more in the middle. I could have kept going with the felting, but I liked this effect so I stopped here.

I’m planning to take advantage of the frilly edges at the top and bottom by having them fold over at the top like a wavy collar. That’s a cotton lining with a magnetic snap that I’m going to hand-sew to the inside and one of my handle options, a translucent purple lucite. The Yarn Deli, absolutely the most delicious place to buy yarn in all of Southern California, has wonderful leather purse handles/straps that you attach with a cute button. I’m leaning towards the leather straps because they’re floppy and natural, like the purse. I just have to bring my purse down there and choose a color.

So, here’s my latest WIP, from Marguerette Tate’s workshop last week. We started out at the very beginning making a background to decorate. Here’s mine, ready for quilting:

Marguerette has the best technique for creating art quilt backgrounds. You start out with strips and end up with two quilt tops ready for embellishing. We worked on just one in the class and saved the other for another day.

Here’s my background all quilted with the beginnings of the dimensional flower embellishments. Can you believe I finished all this before the workshop was through?

I wanted to do my own thing so I quilted one of my skull appliques to the background. I fused two layers of Kona white together to try to mask the strong background behind the white. That worked pretty well, you can barely see the background through it and it will be strong enough to support the embellishments without sagging. I decided against cutting out the background from behind it, although I might experiment with that in future quilts.

When I got home that night I added some beading and Swarovski hot-fix crystals because I had to show it off at the guild meeting the next day. It’s all in a day’s work.

Stay tuned for more beading and embellishments to come.

Remember my sari yarn? After all that work on my website (click here to see the progress on my website) I needed a project that I could actually touch rather than just stare at the computer screen day after day, night after night. Preferably one that I could just relax and not have to think overly much about. Here’s how it’s coming, that’s 18 inches now. I’m quite pleased with how it’s turning out so far. I should have a lovely silk scarf finished by the time that autumn weather hits.

Today for Muse Monday, I’d like to ask for your inspiration. The following are blocks from my guild’s 2008 autumn block exchange. It’s about that time of year for some good autumn projects so what would you do with the blocks below? More about the blocks here.

(The unfinished one on the left is my unfortunate basket. I pieced it wrong and didn’t have time to fix it before the exchange deadline. Luckily all the others turned out OK and I had enough good blocks to exchange. I’ll have to finish piecing it before I turn them into something though.)
So, any ideas?

I’m taking a break from my hand-pieced star quilt and other crafty projects to build my new website, www.laurawestkong.com. So technically this qualifies as a work-in-progress. See how it’s coming along here. If you’d like to watch it grow, drop by every other day or so to see what’s new. Hopefully the summer sunshine will help my website bloom!

I like to doodle in meetings and stuff. When I’m stressed I tend to doodle skulls … lots of them. Not because I’m dark or morbid, but just cause they look like they’re clenching their teeth to keep from exploding. It makes me feel as if I’m not the only one.

Here are some recent sketches I did on my computer. Then I dressed them up a bit. First I tried it sugar skull style. While I do like sugar skull art, my personal style is a bit simpler, so I went with a single bow.

I tested the design on some different fabrics. This combination was one of my favorites. I didn’t cut any bows or teeth out of fabric yet, that’s a paper bow I cut out of some junk mail.

I’m thinking of trying a dimensional appliqué bow. In a few weeks I’m taking a workshop on making dimensional fabric flowers for art quilts. That might be fun to use with the skulls.

Although the teeth are what inspire me to sketch skulls in the first place, I am leaning towards leaving the teeth off, at least for this one.

(Maybe I should give her a sunbonnet and I could call it “Bees in my bonnet”.)

I almost didn’t post the star quilt for you today. I broke my needle a few days ago and didn’t have another right on hand to continue. Sometimes the strangest things get in the way of progress. It’s not like it was the last needle on earth.

What did motivate me to get another needle out was that I decided to post this quilt today and didn’t want to leave that last star hanging halfway on, halfway off. So here are my 19 hand-pieced stars for your viewing pleasure.

In case you’re curious, how exactly does one break a hand-sewing needle? (a good quality needle by the way) Very much like one breaks a needle on the machine. Too much pulling and tugging and … snap! Nickel-plated steel needle vs glazed cotton thread: Thread wins by KO!

Here’s the latest installment of the Star Quilt Saga:
Last week I went fabric shopping specifically for neutrals. I actually came out with exactly that … a bag full of neutral fabric … well, except for that one bright orange batik. I couldn’t resist.

Some of the neutrals are already in the quilt top: 2nd row from the top on the outsides of the gold/pink star and the yellow star on the ends.

My DH commented about this being a “normal” quilt. … Not that it’s “abnormal” (I checked to make sure), just that it looks like a quilt rather than the artistic-painted-beaded wall hangings I usually make. I actually like that comment, it made me laugh and it shows that he really does pay attention to what I’m doing with all that fabric.

Till next time. …