I was making good progress on my two large leaf quilts when I got BADLY distracted. The culprit was the book Serendipity, by Susan Carlson. In it she explains her fabric collage techniques. In many ways they’re the same as my own, but with a much higher level of tiny details. It was all SO…
After getting started on two big leaf quilts, things went pretty smoothly. (The photos in this post show the left quilt.) Having previously drawn the design on a large piece of muslin, I auditioned which green to use where. Can you believe I had to buy MORE fabric? Very unexpected. Here’s the final arrangement of…
A little more eye candy for you from the AQS Daytona show. This is Petals in the Wind by Cassandra Ireland Beaver. (Sorry for the fuzzy phone photo.) There is no black in this quilt. The black you see are holes which show the black curtain behind. Wouldn’t this be pretty against a pale wall,…
Are you a Downton Abbey fan? I AM! Big time. So, when the series ended, I decided to throw a viewing party for the finale. Of course, there would be tea and china, and flowers as well. I had great fun deciding on the menu and prepping the table. The menu included hot tea with…
The prize winners at the Daytona Beach AQS quilt show were quite wonderful. These are some of my favorites. Claudia Pfeil’s Fern Rising won Best of Show and it was very well deserved. The shadows added to the fern shapes made it look extremely 3D. Plus, the use of sheer fabrics (for the spirals) and an…
For me, one of the highlights of the AQS Daytona Beach quilt show was SAQA’s exhibit “People and Portraits.” Even though I had seen these pieces before, I thoroughly enjoying studying them again. Mary Pal’s cheesecloth portraits were some of my favorites. This one is called Homeless Love. As you can see, she shapes tiny bits of…
After studying my quirky fabrics, I decided to work with the yellow-green silk that had been screen printed. I knew I wanted to play up the red design with more red accents. Then, I threw in blue and yellow for good measure. After just a little arranging I remembered, “Oh yeah, I’m not really good…
I’m very comfortable using commercial and hand-dyed fabrics in my creations, but I have a few quirky fabrics that I have to treat differently. Things that ravel, ones that melt, and thin silks. I recently pulled out a few of these to think about how I might use them. The yellow-green fabrics are the result…
If you’ve done much machine quilting you’ve probably had some “friendly” quilts. You know, the wavy ones? This is pretty standard for me so I correct the problem by blocking my quilts. Take this quilt for instance. Pretty bad, right? But, a combination of stretching, pinning, and steaming turned it into this perfectly flat quilt….
My sister and I had a great time attending a recent scarf dying class. Taught by my good friend, Jo-Ann Jensen, she provided me with plain silk, knowing that I’d want to use it in quilts. Of course! She first taught us how to do a tie-dye sort of thing. She calls her geodes. Well,…