Just started on the beaded binding. I’ve got a deadline next week for this, so I’ve been working on little else. Here’s how it’s coming along:
wip wednesday: bead on (and on)
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Category Archives: work in progress
tip tuesday: feelin’ batty
Great guesses on what border fabric I chose! If it didn’t take so long to finish the panel, I would want to try them all out!
My border is a black-on-white polka dot. As I was embroidering I was actually thinking of a multi-color African print for the border, but somehow the polka dots jumped out at me when it came time to add the border. Then I decided to quilt the border with seed beads. … Speaking of seed beads, today’s tip is about choosing batting for beaded quilt wallhangings.
Check out the detail below. There are two different batting effects at play here:
I used black wool felt as the batting for the embroidery panel. Wool felt comes in several thicknesses and many different colors. (Choose a matching felt and if the fibers beard a bit you won’t notice it.) Wool felt is easy to pull the needle through and supports the beadwork very well.
The border was an experiment. It has two layers of Warm & Natural cotton batting. This also supports beadwork well, but gives a different effect. Look carefully and you’ll see that the nylon beading thread carried between the layers creates a bit of puckering like you would get on antique quilts (and new ones as well) when the batting shrinks in the wash. If you’d like the puckered antique look, but don’t want to wash your beadwork (dyed beads can bleed in the wash), this would be the way to go. I haven’t tested this technique with a single layer of cotton batting yet, I needed the heft of two layers to support the wool felt batting in the embroidered block.
The more beads you sew onto your quilt, the more support you’re going to need, so consider all your batting options (including non-traditional ones) before you begin beading. You could even sew a handful of beads on a sample sandwich or two to test the battings out first.
wip wednesday: almost finished!
As you can see, I’ve been a busy little embroiderer/beader. I’m still working on the tree trunk there in the lower right-hand corner in case you’re wondering what that jumble of orange thread is. I might add a few more beads here and there, but it’s basically done.
I’ve already sewn on the border but I’m going to keep you in suspense a little longer about exactly what kind of fabric it is. Anybody care to guess?
wip wednesday: still quilting away
Last month I very nearly ripped all my hand quilting out of this quilt to start over with machine quilting. I’m glad I didn’t though, because now I know exactly how I’m going to finish the hand quilting in the solid yellow bars. =(^_^)=
wip wednesday: and more autumn leaves
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.
wip wednesday
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)~
wip wednesday: felting fun
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.wip wednesday: workshop fun!
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.
wip wednesday: sari scarf
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.
muse monday: autumn block exchange
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?