May Round Up

A recent customer brought me two really lovely quilts to quilt for a charity silent auction.  The charity is  the HBOC Society (hereditary breast and ovarian cancer syndrome).  The first is an Asian themed quilt. 

I had the idea of quilting feathers on a cross hatch background so this seemed like the perfect place to try it out and I have to admit I'm pretty darn happy with the way it looks!  My new "toy" - I'll be playing with it a lot until I get tired of it or get a new toy!  :)

She wanted the ribbon logo in the corners.  I talked her into putting it beside the corners because that print would render it pretty well invisible.  This way it can be seen.  

The second auction quilt is actually a little wall hanging.   I quilted this pretty much as it was quilted in the pattern pix.  

Then there is this "Meadow Quilt".  This is a Lizzy House quilt and Lizzy was in Calgary awhile ago to teach the class, so this is the resulting quilt for one of the students in the class.  

And just yesterday I finished this quilt made to celebrate a 50th wedding anniversary.  I was asked to incorporate some elements from the original wedding invitation.  Since the quilt is so neutral, I treated it mostly as a wholecloth and just had a lot of fun with it.  It is a gloomy day so the pix are a bit dull - but the best I can do today.

Grand kids did a bit of hand emboidery in a few places (5 actually, I think).  It's subtle - I put a heart around each one so look for the hearts.

These pix came in out of order - but the whole quilt is shown above.  Below - shows the central panel - printed with names/dates and a pix of the happy couple on their special day.

Some random phrases from the invitation (at least that's what I assume it was) printed on panels.  I didn't want to quilt over the letters - so did my best to go around them and make it look OK.  The thing about quilting is that, aside from being decorative, it also has the practical function of holding the quilt together and I needed to do some quilting in the text blocks for that reason.

There are a few places where I put a rose and some other small flowers - these were also from the invitation.

A lot of playing with my new toy (feathers on cross hatch).

The corners of the inside panels (arcs with detail) are also from the invitation.  I did the arc border around the centre because, in addition to it being one of my latest favourite borders, it also is reminiscent of church windows, which I think is appropriate here.

Dragon Door

I belong to the Calgary Long-Arm Quilting Group - not really a guild, but a growing group of people who do long-arm quilting - some for just their own quilts and some who also quilt for others.  We decided to do a wholecloth quilt group entry into the annual Heritage Park Festival of Quilts.  So I signed up and spent a bit of time figuring out what I wanted to do and then how to do it (described at the bottom of the pix).  Here is my resulting contribution to our group entry: Draco Ostium, which is the Latin for Dragon Door.

I didn't want to do a "traditional" wholecloth.  I was thinking dragons - we've been watching too many "period" TV where dragons are featured in tapestries, etc.  I found a black and white clip art illustration, imported it to EQ7, traced it in EQ7 then printed it out to the size I needed.  The thing I like about EQ7 is that once the drawing is done it can be printed to any size and it will automatically tile the printout for 8.5*11" paper. The final size of the wall hanging is 26" * 40".  

That was the "easy" part.  Then I had to figure out how to mark it onto black fabric.  In the end I bought some white "carbon" paper.  Of course it's not actually carbon, but some sort of white chalk.  I used that to trace the design onto the fabric.  Because it was chalk it would not last long once I started working with it so the first thing I did once I had it mounted on the frame was to do one stitch line over the entire design.  That became my outline.  From there I stitched over the outlines 4-5 times in gold.  Then I did the background in "mahogany" Glide thread (which is what I use on almost all of my quilting - it runs really well in my machine).  The background is a variety of micro sized fillers - pebbles, matchstick, and swirls.

I was going for a sort of old leather or wood look and I'm really happy with the  way it turned out!  

What the Hex?

Still chipping my way through my fabric stash - this is the product of another bundle of fat quarters I picked up at the Lethbridge Quilt Canada show.  I wanted to try my new Jaybird Hex N More ruler.  So I cut the max number of 6 inch (finished) hexies from each FQ, then added some other fabric to make up the difference for a 60"*72" quilt.  I left some white space for doing some fun quilting.  Experimenting with technique for wholecloth quilt.  I'm pretty happy with the way it all turned out.

Houndstooth Revisited

This is such a fun quilt!  It's easy to make and looks really funky when it's finished.  There are so many ways that it could be made.  I used up a pack of rainbow fat quarters but all that is needed are two colours - a dark and a light.  Or pull out a bunch of scraps.  As long as they can be separated into dark and light, just scramble the darks together and lights together.  

New sewists often ask me questions, or comment that something looks difficult (but it's really not!).  I thought it would be a good idea to put together a class for new sewists that would answer as many of these questions as possible but also send them home with the start of a really cool quilt.  The Houndstooth quilt fits the bill perfectly!  It's easy, yet "cool"!  

Sew... I'll be teaching the Houndstooth quilt over two nights at the Treaducation Centre in Calgary - April 19 and May 3 - with the ulterior motive of building confidence by providing information and technique that will lead to success.  We will talk about everything - tools needed, fabric and thread choices, fabric characteristics, pattern choices, how to measure and cut the quilt, pressing, how to sew the quilt, how to assemble the quilt top, how to put together the quilt "sandwich" for quilting, we'll discuss how to quilt the quilt, learn how to bind it, and "tips and tricks".  Those are the things that I can think of, but as we go along, I will answer other questions that are bound to come up.  This class will give new sewists the confidence to tackle more complex quilts.

Hands on classes in the classroom are great because they are so highly interactive.  Students get the benefit of  having an instructor right there to help with very specific questions and issues as they arise.  With a number of other enthusiasts in the room, brainstorming brings out so many more options that one person just wouldn't think of.  It's a great way to network with others that have your interests and to learn from each other.