AAQI Quilts

These are 2 small applique quilts I am working on for AAQI. They are fused applique and right now that is as far as I have gotten with them. I still need to do some thread painting on both as well as quilting and some hand beading. The butterfly quilt needs a stem on the flower - I forgot that! That's what happens when I work when I'm tired. I'll have to sneak that stem in there some where, and maybe add a leaf or two.

Block of the Month

I joined the Saturday Sampler at my local quilt shop for the first time. I've always lived too far away from the LQS to join until now. This is the November block.

Quilting sampler quilts is always interesting. I like to quilt something different in each block so they take more time to do, but I love the result. I have a sampler on the machine right now that I've been working on for almost 2 weeks. Of course I can only quilt part-time since I homeschool my girls, so you have to take that into consideration. The quilt is nearly done, though

Background

I finally decided to make a pieced background for the lilly appliques since I didn't have enough of any one fabric to use for this "trial-run". It needs more work, but this is a practice piece so I can have fun and play around with it without any pressure.

Fabric Dyeing Experiment

Sunday afternoon I decided to try dyeing a piece of white cotton to another option for the lilly quilt. I use Procion MX dyes and sometimes Rit dyes for fabric, but I didn't have orange or red & yellow to make orange of either of these dyes. My solution was to use my Setacolor fabric paints.

I mixed up the red and yellow to make a medium orange, then thinned it with water and painted it onto the wet fabric with a 2" sponge brush. My piece of fabric is 36" x 60" and I had to really spread that paint out to cover the entire piece. The color was too light so I mixed up more paint in a larger quantity and added more red, then painted it on over top the lighter orange. Yes, I now need to purchase more red and yellow paint!

Since I wanted a textured look, I bunched up the fabric and let it dry on my work surface which is a piece of cardboard covered with heavy plastic. The next morning the fabric was mostly dry so I took the entire piece of cardboard outside and let the wind finish drying the fabric. Since it was cloudy I wasn't concerned about a sunpainted affect which was good since it was also windy and I had to weigh down the fabric and cardboard with rocks. After the fabric dried, I ironed it to heat set it and now it's ready to use!

Here's a close-up of the texture. The photo is a light lighter than the fabric truely is. I love the look of this and think I'll save the fabric for the final quilt instead of using it on the trial run.

An even closer look. I doubt I'll ever be able to dupicate this look again. That's the beauty of hand-dyed fabrics - or in this case, hand-painted fabrics.

Auditioning Background Fabrics

I'm working on a new quilt and making a test-run of fabric colors. This will also be a test-run to see where I need to tweek the design to get the shading right. The final quilt will have different fabrics in it, but with similar colors. I don't have enough of those fabrics to make 2 quilts, so I'm making due with other fabrics. This test-quilt is also 50% smaller than the final quilt will be.

Last night I finished making the lilly appliques and can see where I need to make changes to get the shading to look better. I'm also auditioning backgrounds to see where I need to go.

This is my first choice of background fabrics. I think the complementary orange color works well, and there is enough texture in it to make it interesting. Unfortunately, I only have a fat quarter of this fabric so I would need to locate more or a similar fabric in yardage. That is the problem with all the fabrics I auditioned.

This is a commercial solid. I think it's too flat and needs some texture.

This is one of my hand-dyed pieces. It's better than the solid commercial fabric, but I'm still leaning towards the orange batik.

This is another hand-dyed piece. I think the orange is a bit too red, and again there isn't enough texture.

So the conclusion is that I need to find another piece of orange batik that is large enough for this quilt. I also need to tweek the shading appliques to get a better look. Of course, thread painting will add a lot to it, but I want to try adjusting the design a bit more. Once I get that done and find the background fabric, I'll add the leaves and stems and see how it all looks.

Color Play

While on vacation at the beach last month, DD's and I did some painting with water colors one rainy day. These photos are some of what I painted. They are lessons out of "Color and Composition" by Katie Pasquini Masopust & Brett Barker. It was an exercise in non-representational design using a triadic color scheme.

I made 3 paintings using a different triadic color scheme in each one.

Of course, these exercises were to be done with fabric, but I didn't have any with me. Watercolors was the best option at the time. I didn't take a lot of time with these either, so they are pretty loose. It did give me a chance to try out different color schemes than what I tend to use, and it was a quick project. Just right for a rainy day.

Machine Embroidery

Isn't this gorgeous! This is a machine embroidered customer quilt that I finished on Saturday. I can only imagine the number of hours the customer put into creating this quilt top. It just blows me away!