Sunrise Quilt Studio

My quilts arrived back home safe and sound. To my delight, "Feathered Star" had a Teacher's Choice Award ribbon pinned to it! Thank you, Irena Bluhm. If you ever have the chance to take a class from Irena, I encourage you to do so. Not only does she teach her wonderful techniques for coloring quilts, but she also teaches balance, symmetry, repetition, design, etc. All the ingredients that make a quilt pleasing to the eye.

The past few weeks have been extremely busy leaving me little time to post. But tomorrow I'm heading to MQS with a quilting friend and am looking forward to - well - more busy-ness, but fun busy-ness. I've signed up for several classes, allowing plenty of time to shop, of course! The quilt above is "Feathered Star". Such an uninspiring title my daughter tells me, but there you have it. It will be entered in the art/pictoral category. It is a mix of techniques and art media including colored pencils, inks, several different threads, and crystals. "Coronet" is in the fabric challenge. Once again a mixture of techniques, fabrics, and threads with lots of hand beading. I designed it using Art 'n Stitch software. Lots of fun! I hope to see you at MQS this week.

I found these quilt tops in a small antiques & flea market in Southwest Missouri this past weekend. They are both showing some ravages of time, but are still in pretty good shape.

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!

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.....