Sunrise Quilt Studio

The quilting is complete on the applique whole cloth that I have named "Golden Feathered Star" at this point. The name may change as I continue to work on it. Yesterday, I washed out the blue soluble pen and blocked the quilt.  Today I am considering how to color the quilt. Colored pencils, or inks, and what colors and where to place them. Hmmm.....

The snow has stopped, the sun is shining now, and the snow is sparkling to the point of being blinding. Quite a change from yesterday when there were white-out conditions most of the day. This is my front porch. The snow drifts covered the stairs and landing and piled up against the door.   This is what I found at 6:30 this morning when I opened the door. Thats 30 inches of snow! There is 18" piled up against the back door, but luckily we can get out of the basement door and the garage door. My big dogs were up to their shoulders in the snow when I let them out this morning.  Look how pretty the cedar grove is, though. With temperatures due to drop below zero later today, the girls and I are going to start shoveling this morning. Hopefully we'll get some progress made. This is going to take days to clear out, though. At least the fridge is stocked and we have power!

We had a good time at the thread painting workshop on Saturday. There were 7 quilt artists in attendance and we all learned something new. This is a great group of ladies. Everyone is generous in offerring their advice and expertise in quilting, art, and machine operation. Below is the flower I worked on during our class. It is unfinished as of now. The flower below is one I completed before class. I added some gold metallic thread to the edges of the petals to give it some sparkle. This flower was also completed before class. I'm still debating on whether or not the leaves need something more. It's hard to know when to stop! This is a shot of the fabrics I am auditioning for the finished project. My plan is to cut out the flowers and leaves and make a collage of them on a background piece. I'll probably use the cream batik for the background. The purple fabric is the challenge fabric for MQS 2011. I'd like to incorporate that fabric into the quilt also. It will...

I've made some progress on the applique whole cloth quilt. The elements are all quilted using Glide thread in gold, including the motifs in the applique circles I'm McTavishing the background of the area outside of the star. I'm about 3/4 of the way done with that section. Ooops! I missed a section! I'll have to go back and get that. I'm using Sew Fine 401 - white 50 wt. thread for the background filler. I'm still looking for a background filler for inside the star. I'll also do some background filler in the applique circles in the gold, but nothing too dense. Once the quilting is complete, I'll soak out the blue pen marks, block the quilt and then add color to the motifs. I'm debating over colored pencil or ink. I'll have to do a few sample pieces before I commit. Tomorrow I am leading an art quilter's group in a thread painting class. I'm looking forward to that. It should be lots of fun.

This vintage quilt belongs to my MIL. She received the vintage blocks from another DIL and made the top. I love the yellow she chose for the border. The quilt is bright and cheery. She wanted some simple meander quilting in the background and quilting to showcase the Dresdan Plates. I think this fits the bill.

Last May I took a class with Irena Bluhm at MQS on wholecloth design. Now I've been creating wholecloth quilts for several years now, but it's always good to get someone elses take on wholecloth. You can always pick up some tips and tricks that you didn't know before. This class was no exception. Irena was teaching us not only wholecloth design, but also how to incorporate applique into a whole cloth quilt. She even had a short segment on coloring with colored pencil. I had taken that class the year before and was familiar with the technique. The quilt above is what I designed in Irena's class. Over the past few weeks I finished hand appliqueing the circles. Yesterday I started the quilting. I'm using 2 layers of batting and Glide thread in gold. Here you can see a bit more detail. These are Irena's feather patterns. Here is an typical example of my quilting design process - the design changes as I quilt :o.  The feathers in the center were my first choice...

In a few weeks I am teaching a class on thread painting to the art quilter's group in my quilt guild. So, this weekend I did a bit of experimenting with various floral patterns. This is the one I consider successful. The other 2 started with a pattern sketched from a photograph and they looked a bit rough when I finished them. They need a bit more work to be polished. Most of the thread painting that I do is done with my longarm machine on applique. The photo above is a 4x6" piece of floral fabric fused onto a piece of Peltex and thread painted on my domestic sewing machine. This will become a post card. My next test will be using Decor Bond as a stabilizer. That is what I use to stabilize my projects when thread painting with my longarm machine. I'm hoping it will also work well with the domestic machine.