I'm addicted! More Postcards

I am just loving the fabric postcards.  I love that I can create something in 15 minutes, half an hour, or an hour and have a finished project.

Today I quilted with my hopes for 2016 in mind. Last year was really hard. From being horribly sick for the first 22 weeks of my pregnancy, to the horrible ending of that pregnancy; and then the passing of my great-Aunt (which sounds somewhat distant relative, but she was essentially my grandmother). It won't go in the history books as a good year, as much as great things happened along the way. (I got to grow and love Sean, I got to go on a great cruise, I had a great job, I had my husband every step of the way, I found out even more than I already knew how blessed I am to live in such a great neighborhood.)

So for 2016, the first thing I quilted was sun, shining from the darkness. And then the next was a rainbow. And that is what I want for this year.

And what is the most fun about these little mini quilts, is that I'll get to mail them to someone during the year and brighten their day. That is, if I don't hoard them.

Faux quilted fabric postcard tutorial

Here's another tutorial on a different style of postcard- this one is the faux quilted look.
Mine isn't perfect, because nothing I make is- but the video includes a few tips to help yours look closer to perfect (if that matters to you). The number one hint is to measure you fabric, something I didn't do, and to pay more careful attention to where you are stitching. 



I like a quick and easy project more than I like a perfect product most of the time.  As long as you aren't looking super close up like the camera is, I think this looks pretty good!

Enjoy!

Fabric Postcard Tutorial

I made a video tutorial to show you how to make a simple fabric postcard.



The ones I've posted on previous days I've used either wonder-under fusible or a gluestick to secure fabric and then sewed it down. In this video, I highlight one really beautiful piece of fabric instead.

Do you want to recieve the postcard I made in the video? Comment below by January 2nd 2016 and I will pick someone (out of a hat) to send it to.

Make sure you are not a "no reply" blogger so I can get in touch with you to get your address if you are selected.
Here's a tutorial to check: http://morefromyourblog.com/no-reply-blogger-how-to-fix-this/
Chances are if you are a no-reply blogger you don't even know it!  (Or leave your email address if you are one on purpose and still want to enter.)

International readers are welcome to enter as well!

Four more postcards

My Christmas Eve goal was to get some cleaning done in my sewing room. I guess I still have time to do that, but I have my doubts it will get done.

Instead, I made 4 more postcards. These are fun and addictive.

I made one very similar to yesterday's:

I made one with some of my favorite batiks. I really like this one:

I tried something different, not my favorite:

And I made one that looks quilted. Not sure what I think. I do know it's a really bad picture!

Fabric postcards

My apologies for the months between posts. I don't know if anyone still reads, but if they do- I am going to try harder in the new year to post interesting things.

Things got very hard here since my last post.  In October we found out that the baby had a very rare (and extremely large) chromosomal deletion. Then in November we lost him.  I delivered Sean still on November 12. Needless to say, things have been very difficult. His life would have been full of an unbelievable number of challenges that we know this is for the best, but every morning that I wake up without my little boy I just feel empty.

In an effort to try to add a little happiness to my life, I've started making quilted fabric postcards to mail out for postcard swaps. (I'll post if I get any cards back!)

The first three I made using fused scraps. My favorite is the woven one!

Have you ever made a fabric postcard?  I'm told I can mail them with a normal stamp (not a postcard stamp- it's too little), but well, I have my doubts.  I will let you know if I hear they made it to their destination.  I hope to make a tutorial on how to make them soon.

2014 Color Challenge Quilts

In 2014 my small quilt group came up with a challenge. Each month, someone would bring a fabric or collection of fabrics to act as color inspiration. Then all the members of the group would create a 12" quilt showcasing those colors.  It was amazing to see what different people did each month.

Although I didn't intend to, my quilts seemed to have a few themes running through them. I grouped them by technique, but you'll notice a lot of circles and stripes too! Here are my twelve quilts from 2014. I may have shared some of these before, but never as a group.



Two quilts with stitch and slash.  I love the red one!

And then there were applique quilts. Here the dresden plate is my favorite, but I also love the raw edge arrows.

 

The next group is improvised piecing. I love all of these, but the gray with pink is my favorite of the 12.  It is a lot of fun to piece with no idea of where you are going!

 And then a few odd balls. Painting instead of piecing, quilt and piece at the same time, woven fabric, and then my very first try at a mosaic technique (the flowers are from where I spilled something when we met at Panera...)

Collage Quilt: Ice Skater

I've been wanting to try a new technique, fabric collage, for awhile and I have also been wanting to make an ice skater quilt for a few years.

I decided it would be perfect to do both together and set to make a quilt last weekend (or so, not sure when I did it...)  I'm telling you ahead of time that it is an ice skater, because other people have guessed it is a lizard and a turkey!

I started by outlining a photo of Mirai Nagasu doing a layback spin in photoshop, printing it, and then tracing that outline onto a piece of fabric (it is about 17 x 20 finished size). Since it would be covered, I just used a sharpie to trace.

Then, I filled in the entire outline with various green fabrics. Some of the fabrics I used were sort of large, and I maybe should have used smaller ones, but I think it is okay for a first effort.I used a glue stick to hold all the fabrics down, being careful not to glue too close to the drawn line on the fabric.  Once the whole area was filled, I cut along the line to leave the outline of the skater.

Then, I used black and white fabric to completely fill the background. Since I did not glue close to the traced line, the fabric that butts up against the skater is tucked under the green fabric.

This was where I made my mistake. Since the green is dark, there is not enough of a value difference between the black and white and the green. The skater recedes in the quilt.  If I had thought to take a black and white picture in process, I would have seen the problem.

I've since learned "Color gets all the credit, but value does all the work". Oh well, it was a first effort, and I decided to keep going. I thought maybe quilting would help a bit (and it did- a bit...)

So onto the quilting. I took the collage layer (piece of fabric with tons of fabric scraps glued to it) and sandwiched it with backing and batting, like normal. However, the secret here is to also layer a piece of tulle over the collage. This holds down the hundreds of raw edges.  Then, quilt like normal.

I started by outlining the skater, and then filled her in with pebbles.  I used flowing echoes on the black and white, but you really can't see much of them in the final product.  However, the green pebbles, and the black thread on the background did pull the colors together just a little bit.  Here is the quilting:

And, since I'm really trying to practice my hand binding- I pulled the binding to the back and hand stitched it.  I have to say- it really does look better than machine stitching.  I got milliners needles, and they help 100%- it is so much easier to go through the layers. And using a longer needle means I don't prick my finger with the back of the needle.

Eagle Quilt

I took a class last weekend on surface design- using thickened dyes to paint on fabric. (Confusing to call it painting- because it is definitely dyeing, not painting...)

Anyhow- I "invented" (someone has probably done it before me) a technique to make a variegated

line. I took a squeeze bottle and stacked yellow and red, so it would squeeze out yellow, red, and shades of orange.  Then I drew a stippled  line all over a piece of fabric.

When I got home I had this idea to stipple all the white space. Following the curve of the line I stippled about 75% of the quilt, all but inside one big blog near the bottom. I thought it would look cool to pebble that- if you look closely you can see the change of texture.

This was my idea for a finished project, but it didn't look like anything.

So I thought I should overdye it.  I overdyed in a light orange dye bath.  Now you can see the white quilting lines better, but it still didn't look like anything.

I had the idea to make it into a sunset. I went through Kevin's animal photographs (I wanted a giraffe, but couldn't find just the right one) and found a gorgeous eagle sitting on branches, and went to work in photoshop tracing it as a silhoutte.

I used freezer paper to cut it out of fabric backed with fusible, and fused my eagle onto the quilt. It is just fused, not stitched, so super easy raw edge applique. My freezer paper didn't want to stay attached, so cutting the fine detail was a bit tough.

It still needs binding, but I am so happy that my sunset silhouette turned out nicely!

Zen Doodles Workshop

I am a member of the Old Capital Quilt guild, and each month the guild brings in a speaker and a workshop. These workshops always take place during the week, so I am generally unable to participate due to work.  This month the instructor was Laura Wasilowski.  I think I've professed a love for her artwork on my blog before- without a doubt, I knew I had to take her class.

She spoke last night at the guild- about making serial quilts. The same thing, and doing it a lot.  Lots of artists work in series, but I loved her reason why "then you don't need a new idea for a long time!"  Her talk was filled with incredible humor, and funny songs.

Today's workshop was on Zen Doodle quilts. I had taken her Craftsy class (hey, it's on sale this week)  so I was a little wary going into it (due to a bad experience with a Des Moines AQS workshop, my rule was to never take a class where I knew something about the subject: that was an advanced free motion class where we spent the whole time stippling and doing basic meanders, what a waste of money)- but I am SO glad I did it.  I'm not sure I really learned anything new exactly, but the class really got my creative juices flowing and I love the project I made.

The class kit included about a 1/2 yard of a dark rainbow colorway and 1/4 yard of a pastel (full length of the yardage- but 1/2 and 1/4 WOF).  We were also given a few strings of embroidery thread so we can embellish when we got home.

After going over some basic rules of fusing, we were given some time to doodle. We were told to make 12 doodles, but I only took a picture of 6.

Then, we took our favorite doodle and made it a large pattern.

Then, we made the pattern into fabric!

One of the things we did was embellish the fabric pieces with other fabric. The zig zag pieces on the triangles are not patterned fabric- they are separate cut out fabric pieces. 

This took a long time.  The  light purple triangles inside the dark blue triangles are also all cut out.  Lots of tiny pieces, all fused in place.

As is typical with my art projects (teachers hated me for this), I finished early. I was able to put a border on my quilt and call it done. 

Now I just have to decide if I want to add hand embroidery (I'm not sure- I can't think of what to do with it) and also to quilt it (also need how to do this).  I also need to figure out a binding. I don't have any of the kit fabric left in the dark colors, and I think the light wouldn't look great for binding.  Maybe I'll just do black. 

It was a FABULOUS day. Wish I was retired and could do more of the workshops.

Art quilt

Every year my guild has a challenge and this year was to make an art quilt.  I was excited about that- because it is the area of quilting I'm most interested in. However, it turns out I'm not artistic at all.

I decided to make a literal quilt. The quilt wouldn't lie to you, so it must be art.

For this quilt I used a variety of new techniques, and mixed it in with my old favorite: free motion quilting. Just like my snowflake quilt, each square has its own free motion design.  The new techniques are : ice dyeing, over dyeing (I dyed the finished quilt, minus the word Art, rather than the fabric ahead of time), free motion couching, and free motion in open space. It is also a bit mixed media, because it incorporates the sequins (glued on), and possibly you could count the yarn in that (I also dyed the yarn).

Here is a close up of the couching. The thread I used matches the blue yarn, and it sews onto the yarn, not around it.  If you look closely you can see it on the yellow, and in a few spots on the fabric where the needle missed the yarn completely.  The free motion couching foot is awesome, but not fool proof.

Is this quilt art?

So I made some more progress on my art quilt.  First, I decided rather than "This quilt is art" I'm going with "is this quilt art".  I took the diane-shiko block and cut out the word "IS", satin stitched around it, covered it with water soluble stabilizer and quilted using three different colors of thread.  So that leaves this block:

I liked it so much, I decided rather than mixed technique, I would do all the blocks like this.  However, I think for the words QUILT and ART I am going to try to suspend them inside the cut out space.  We'll see how it goes when I get there.

Today I used a tutorial Diane Gaudynski posted to try a new design called Celtic Bubbles. This was a really fun design to create, although my circles are just not perfect!  I need to work on the spacing between my echoing lines (the one thing I noticed is my stitch length is getting to be very consistent- that's exciting!)  I think the best way to do this is to doodle more, my drawing isn't very good either...

This will be the background for the word "this", which I will hopefully get done this week.

I need to figure out when the guild art quilt challenge is due.

I'm thinking maybe I should do some hand embroidery with yarn on it, just to give it more color (or at very least satin stitch around the letters in darker thread to hide the quilting that had to come up to the fabric to attach the floating threads), and possibly dye the quilt.  I don't know yet

Mario quilt still just needs binding, but I have to take out my embroidery machine to get a label on it, so I'm not very motivated to finish.

The end is near!

Today I spent pretty much the entire day quilting.  I finished stippling the outside of the center (large) square.  I did some pebbling, some spirals, and some lines to fill the rest of the middle of the snowflake.  And magically- all the quilting was done!

Up next was assembly, after a few false starts (sewing the strips to the wrong sides) I had the blocks all assembled.  Um, this quilt is big.  I've laid it all out before, but for some reason I kept thinking it would shrink once it was put together.  Nope- big, big quilt.  I'm not sure where it will go in the house, maybe it will have to go into my office.

I started putting the sashing on the front.  I tried to do the wavy sashing, but I couldn't figure out how to make it curve- I even made sure to cut bias binding, but I kept getting ugly wrinkles, so mine is just going to be square.  I need to sew together the LONG strips now- they will have to be seamed, although, since I'm not doing waves, maybe I can cut on the cross grain and do a 55 inch long strip?  I don't know if that is the best use of fabric, the seams aren't generally that visible.

I'm also trying to decide if I want to do some decorative stitching down the middle of the strips- I think it will give them a bit more weight and prevent the quilt from folding along the strips.  I could do it in white and it would be pretty much invisible, only seen by someone who admires it really closely, or I could do it in pink and pull the color out from the blocks (but then my stitching needs to be perfectly straight...)   I only have a 5 mm machine, this is something that would be really great with a 9 mm.

Before I can do the binding, I need to make a label on my embroidery machine and get it onto the back of the quilt.  I also need to decide if I think corner triangles will support the weight or if I have to do a proper hanging sleeve. The problem is- those require hand sewing, and I can't do that!

But OMG! the quilting is done!  I took this project on with just about a year of experience under my belt, to prove to myself that I could quilt.  And you know what- I can quilt!  (I'm thinking about entering it in the state fair this summer.  It isn't show quilt perfect, but I think it is pretty darn awesome (though once I get the binding on, that may not be true anymore, I suck at binding...)