Sunrise Quilt Studio

I am working on a hand-beaded quilt for entry at MQS. This is a photo after 3 different beading patterns. It is slow going, but it is turning out well. I can see why many quilters use hot fixed crystals instead of hand-beading - it must be faster and easier on the hands. I am having so much trouble with pain in my hands the past 2 days that I know I'm beading too many hours per day. Deadline for shipping is going to come way too fast for me so I have to keep at it.

I've been working little-by-little on the Feathered Star quilt. I decided to color the feathers to match the circles, otherwise the entire quilt would look disconnected. From a distance, there are just blobs of color from the appliqued circles and the feathers didn't stand out. Coloring the feathers with gold ink would not have been cohesive in my opinion. I tried out the different color combinations on a scrap piece and came to that conclusion. So now the feathers will stand out and coordinate with the applique circles. There is still a lot of work to do, and lots of hours to put into this quilt, so it won't be ready for MQS this year. I do have another quilt I'm working on that should be ready for entry. It will be in the "Fabric Challenge" section. I'm working on the appliques at this point, but almost done with that. I should have it on the machine to quilt later this week. Then I'll photograph it and send in the entry form. The March 18th deadli...

The latest project for "Fancy Threads", the art quilters group in my guild, was thread painting trees. Here is my completed project. The piece was machine quilted on the longarm without a backing - using only the top, batting, and a layer of Decor Bond for stabilizer. The trees were thread painted using my domestic sewing machine. I decided to use some rayon threads to give a bit of shine, and I experimented with using the zigzag stitch on my machine to do the thread painting. After ripping out the 2nd tree I stitched, the quilt looked much better. I had made the tree on the far left too wide, and the quilt was puckering. So I spent 2 hours ripping it out and started over. I like it much better now. Next month we will be making quilted postcards. This group is soooo much fun! I'm having a blast!