Dog Background

I'm not sure if I ever explained what I was going to do with the three thread painted dog portraits once I finished them.  I decided to mount them (process still to be determined) on a larger quilted background piece.  On that background piece, I decided to bobbin quilt outline drawings of the dogs, just a little offset.

So after layering, basting, and lining up my drawings on the back, I started the bobbin quilting around the first two dogs.  The thread I'm using in the bobbin is Halo by Superior.  My mom lent me a spool.  So far it's running absolutely great in the bobbin (knock on wood).

Here's where the dogs are so far; I think I need to go back and work on Missy's left ear and Bullet's jawline.  It's kind of hard to tell from the back as you're sewing how it's going to look.  The fabric is actually navy, the last (out-of-focus-cellphone)-picture shows more or less how it's going to be arranged in the end.

Linking up with Nina-Marie as always.  I hope everyone has a good weekend!

Kind People.

My mom juse sent me her quilt to be donated to victims of the recent tornadoes in our area.  It's for the Moore Loves campaign run by the OKC MQG.  The quilt is super scrappy and made using the block tutorial here.  I love all the bright colors and hope it makes a small child feel like someone is thinking about him!

I also wanted to say thanks to all the quilters out there (who don't even know me in person or via blog) who've called to make sure I was ok after all the tornadoes.  And as an even more lovely example, I got quilts back from a show in Albuquerque NM just last week and included was a fabulous fat quarter of some yummy dragon print fabric.  Attached was a note saying that a lady visiting the show had dropped of the fabric for me because she saw where I was from and wanted me to know she was thinking about everyone affected by the storms.  So sweet!  Thanks to all the caring people out there!

Progress on the Orchard Quilt

Lately I've been working on the orchard quilt, last seen here.   Having finally settled on an arrangement for the trees, I fused them down and began quilting in the extra branches.  It was quite a bit of thread work through all three layers to get all those extra branches in, as all of the skinny and most of the medium thickness branches are thread, not fabric. There are a bunch of unfortunate knots/birds nests on the back that are really frustrating but that I can't really pick out because they're on top of a bunch of other thread work.  I did discover that when coming back through with the snow colored thread on the branches, that I could sew over the brown branches and then color over it with brown/black/purple marker if needed (those were the colors with which I quilted the trees).  Saved me quite a few stops and starts.

Unfortunately, I realized (after doing all the work on the trees), that I definitely should have quilted the background first.  FIRST FIRST FIRST.  You guys cannot imagine, I had to stop and start my thread (and then BURY THEM ALL) for every little tiny section of background that shows between tree branches.  

Then when I started quilting the background snow, I got a whole section quilted and my thread broke.  I turned it over and was horrified to see a giant disaster.  I had to rip out the whole section.  I was so frustrated and only after much tribulation realized I'd been using the wrong bobbin.  ARGH.  Not as in the wrong color/thread bobbin, but as in a bobbin that goes to a different sewing machine all together.......

But anyway, it's coming along nicely now.  I'm switching back to the dog portraits for a while, but the next steps on this will be to put in the shadows for the trees, quilt the sky in the inset, and add a frolicking dog in the foreground snow.

Linking up with Lee and Nina-Marie as always!

Charity Quilt for Tornado Victims

The OKC Modern Quilt Guild is gathering quilts to give to Tornado victims in their "Moore Love" drive.  The devastation here is enormous and if you can, I encourage you to participate.

I decided to make a quilt using Jeni's large star tutorial.  After sewing it all together I realized it's been a long time since I made a quilt that big (it's 72" square).  It's a good thing I didn't plan a king sized bed quilt!  I love the colors, pink and green always make me thing of watermelon, and I hope that it makes someone feel cozy and remembered.

First try at Machine Embroidery

Since I was thinking about buying the embroidery unit for my Bernina 450, when I was home over memorial day I thought I'd play around a bit with my mom's embroidery system.  She has a Bernina 180, which is a bit old but works great.

To start off though, I wanted to work with my mom a bit to learn some of the things she's learned.  There's actually quite a bit to your selection of stabilizer/interfacing, how to hoop, etc.  She's really gotten into designing and digitizing her own patterns which is where the creative aspect comes in for us, but obviously I started out with purchased designs.     The awesome Urban Threads was having a 50% off sale, so  I embroidered a onesie with this adorable robokitty (sorry I don't have a picture of it).  I also embroidered two firebirds on the back of my hoodie.  I love this design and was pleased to be able to get them lined up fairly well (although I probably could have used a 4th layer of stabilizer).

When I got home I went to the local Bernina store (Emily is great up there BTW) and bought the embroidery module for my machine.  I went through the manual and everything, but am having lots of problems with my initial test embroideries.  Any time there is satin stitch (either in letters or on a design), the bobbin thread pulls up terribly from the back (look at the white all over the designs and letters).  It got a bit better but didn't go away when I tightened the bobbin tension (as tight as I could!) and loosened the top (third picture with red bird).  Interestingly it doesn't happen on fill stitches (non satin stitch bird in fourth picture).

In case you can't read it, underneath the bird it says "This is a bird.  She lives by our door and poops on our porch.  We are happy to have her anyway."  I wanted to test letters but couldn't think of anything clever to say....

The last two pictures are some key fobs I made after doing more embroidery tests, as you can see the bobbin thread is still pulling to the front!  Any suggestions?  It's really frustrating me.

Linking up with Lee and Nina-Marie as ever!

SAQA blog for KS/MO/OK region

I hope everyone had a good weekend.  We weathered the next round of storms safely, although everything is still very wet and there was a bunch of damage in nearby areas.

I actually got a lot of sewing done this weekend, thanks to having no internet and (finally) no outside obligations so I'll be sharing some of that in the next couple of days.

A couple of items of business though, first, I'm the moderator for the new regional SAQA blog (Kansas/Oklahoma/Missouri).  SAQA is a great organization for art quilters and I'm excited that our region is becoming more active.  We're going to be featuring one regional artist every week and today I've just put up a short interview with the wonderful Charlotte Hickman.  Check it out if you're interested.

Second, several people have been having difficulty getting e-mails about new posts since I moved this blog over from the old address (several months ago).  I removed the e-mail subscription option and replaced it with a new one.  For those of you following by e-mail can you sign up again please and would someone be kind enough to let me know it's working?  Very sorry for the headache!

And, because a quilt blog shouldn't be picture-less, I'll leave you with this shot of the Pumpkin-dog.  I finished quilting her over the weekend.

WIP: The Dogs

I haven't written a progress-update post in a while, mostly because I haven't been making much progress!  When I got back from Seattle last week I spent a fair amount of time cleaning up the studio in anticipation of really digging back into my various ongoing projects, and as testament to how long it's been since I've really gone through things, the pile on my "most current things" table had unaddressed stuff from early March...

I got it all cleaned up and have since been working away on my dog portraits which I'll talk more about in a minute.  I do somehow seem to have gotten a bunch of unfinished projects tacked up in mid-completion.

So, no progress this week on:
Armadillo Whole Cloth (this is just for practice FMQ)
Orchard Quilt (I'm about 1/3rd done quilting this)
Mountains (This just needs binding/pocket/label, but I'm still not totally satisfied with the large green foreground mountains, so we'll see what I decide)
Rainbow Star (The next step on this is piecing the piano key border)
Mammal Medallion (This is my next big art quilt, still in the early design stages)

I have been working hard on the dog portraits- I'd originally wanted to finish them by the end of this month to enter a show, but I really don't think I'm going to make it.

Since I last posted I finished the thread painting on the Pumpkin dog and layered the Pumpkin dog and the Bullett dog for quilting.  I stretched/ironed them out as flat as I could (Bullett had been stapled to a blocking board for months anyway), and layered them with two batts.  I used wool batting since that's what I have right now.  I put two batts because I thought that might help with any distortion in the top from the dense thread painting and that it might give a little extra weight to help with hanging.  I hate seeing quilts that don't hang straight and flat (and mine often have that problem).

I'm quilting each dog separately and then am going to mount them to a separate quilted back piece (kind of like pinning a picture to a bulletin board).  More on that when I get to it.  I quilted the "dog" part of Bullett and Pumpkin using clear monofilament (since they're already so covered in thread from the thread painting), and was pleased with how they flattened out.

I decided to wait to do the backgrounds until I've thread painted Missy since I'd like all the backgrounds to look consistent and I think I'll have a better chance of that if I quilt them at the same time.  So in the last couple of days I've been working on Missy.  Slow going with all the thread changes but I think she's looking good so far (the weird circle is where I had her hooped).

I've noticed that the thread painting on Pumpkin is much more dense than that on Bullett (who was finished first a couple of years back).  I'm trying for a happy medium on Missy.

No Link up at Lee's this week, but I'm going to be sharing over at the fabulous Nina-Marie's.

Tornado

Many of you have sent me very kind e-mails, thank you very much.  We're ok, the tornado hit about a mile north of our house.  Please keep everyone in your prayers though as rescue workers dig through the rubble looking for people still missing and those affected cope with loss.

Exciting news!

MQS was in Wichita this past weekend and I went up to see the show.  For those of you haven't been before, it's a show highlighting machine quilting, most (although by no means all) of the quilters who enter are professional longarmers.  The quilts are just outstanding, machine quilting (and piecing/appliqueing etc.) like you would not believe.  I'm always in total awe, and this year was no exception.

Anyway, they do have a small division called Just For Me for non-professionals who enter, and this year Seymour won best of show in that division!  The prize was a new Bernina 450 kindly donated by Midwest Sewing Center in Wichita.  I've never owned a Bernina before and I'm super excited.  Since it doesn't have a very large space under the arm, it won't replace my beloved Janome 7700, but I'm thinking about getting the embroidery unit for it and trying my hand at machine embroidery.

It was so cool to see Seymour hanging there on the row of "big winners".  He looks so small as all the other winning quilts were huge and gorgeous.  There were six big winning quilts, I couldn't get a picture with all of them at once.

I guess next year I have to move into the bottom of the professional division!  In other exciting news, Seymour is going to be part of one of the Special Exhibits at IQF Houston this fall, so keep a lookout for him if you're there.

SAQA Auction Donation Quilt

Last week I was in Seattle for the big annual conference for vision researchers (I'm so thrilled it wasn't in Fort Lauderdale again), and the week before that my mom and I went to the annual SAQA conference held in Santa Fe.  I have lots of rambly thoughts about that trip which are in an unfinished blog post somewhere.  I'm not sure if I'll post them here or not, but it was a great trip.

While there, I got talked into making a SAQA auction quilt.  Every year they auction off 12" x 12" art quilts to raise money for the organization.  I started with a piece of fabric left over from our sun printing project.  I shouldn't really say left over (thus implying I've completed all other associated projects), since I haven't yet done anything with the other sun printed blocks, but anyway....

This piece of fabric was actually red; my mom heard somewhere you could sunprint with setacolor (I think) so she painted it red and tried it out.  It didn't print very well, so I just mashed the piece of fabric around in our leftover sunprinting solution and layered a bunch of different negatives on top just to see what happened.

I'm sorry I didn't take a picture of the fabric before assembly, but it looked kind of cool with four layered jellyfish prints and an anemone print on a splotchy background.  I squared it up and pieced it into a spinning log cabin (anyone know the official name of that block?).  It's machine quilted and partially layered with three different kinds of tulle to give the impression of being underwater.

I love the jellyfish.  They're by far my favorite part.  I used several different colors and weights of thread and I think they turned out nicely.

Overall, not one of my favorite pieces but I hope it can raise a little bit of money for SAQA!

Linking up with Fabric Tuesday over at Quilt Story!