Tiny Steps…

Here is the next step in getting this piece ready for beading. I did all I think I can do with the felting. The black cording is couched on and my beading lines will roughly follow those black lines.

I’m kind of surprising myself with that, too. I think I actually learned from my last improv beaded piece that a little bit of pre-planning can be quite helpful!

This little detail is one that I’m going to try NOT to cover with beads. Just a simple little turn of the silk, but sometimes those details help with the overall picture.

This may be one of those projects that goes to the back of the “blog projects” list. There may not be updates as I go along and work on it. I’ll just spring it on you again when it’s done…just about the time you’ve forgotten all about it and you’ll wonder “What in the world is she talking about now?” I’ll try to work fast so that doesn’t happen, but I do work on more than one project at a time, so we’ll see…

I need to learn more about linking these project updates together…oh-another way to procrastinate when I’m not ready to sit down and actually work!!! Or can I use the excuse that learning new things keeps my brain alive and active? Yeah, that’s it…

Here’s the start…

It’s Been a While…

…since I played with my felting machine. I have a beading project in mind that I wanted to put on a wool background. I have several pieces of wool and some small pieces of silk that I wanted to felt all together for a background for the beads.

The main piece for the background is a very soft wool, even after I tried to shrink it. I laid out all my little pieces of silk and wool and started felting. This is what I had after the first run through.

The silk is NOT nice! It will not play well with the wool. I was able to felt from the back into the silk on the front, but it looks pretty darn bad!

 

It is not a disaster for this project, but it won’t be a set of fabrics I’ll put together for the felting machine again. On this project, the beads will mostly cover up the awful looking bits and what does show will be mostly just for a touch of color.

I also found out that you can, indeed, felt a hole right through the wool! Trying to make things stick together well doesn’t mean felt extra in one spot! Those sharp little barbs just kept going up and down and up and down and chewed up the silk and wool in that little spot. I just put another piece of wool on the back and felted a little bit to fix it, but it’s another lesson learned.

A couple of pieces of yarn completed my background experiments for the day. I had originally planned on a few tiny bits of silk here and there, but since it didn’t felt…that won’t make much difference either.

Then I decided to try another piece of shrunken wool sweater and some yarn. It was okay, but the sweater wool wasn’t completely felted because it still had a bit of stretch to it. I needed to keep the fabric taut as I moved it through the machine.

I still have a lot to learn about what works and what doesn’t on this machine. I need to spend some time with it. It’s a lot of fun playing and I’m always happiest when I’m learning something new!

Oh, Now What…?

The finishing touches and quilting were all that were left to do on my Karen Musgrave challenge. I wanted to get that done today. I cut a little strip from the bright green organdy to check the width of my ruffle and I liked it.

THEN I played with the next little strip and it was just way too easy to turn that into a little flower.

And the little piece that was left from that corner of the organdy made a perfect little leaf.

I don’t have a ton of that organdy to play with since it was an opportunistic dye job. Should I try to do the ruffle AND some flowers and leaves? Or should I stick with my original plan and just put on the ruffle? I have some lime green angelina fiber…should I throw that on someplace, too?

I just couldn’t decide today if I want to go over the top, stay within “normal” (for me!) range or pull back on the lime and try for moderation? So, now what…?

Fun Beading Class

Saturday I taught a class at The Bead Box here in Tecumseh. I’m not a Valentine or heart person, generally, but this design almost made itself, so it was a natural for a class just before Valentine’s Day!

'Love You' original

My personal preference is for using a variety of beads, so that’s what The Bead Box ladies created for us in our bead kits and they were perfect. The class was for learning stacks and fringes, but none of the ladies had done any beading before. So, we started with the basics and they learned very quickly!

In this picture, you can see that the design was just drawn on the fabric, attached to the backing and beaded, beaded, beaded!

Each lady chose her beads at random, so every heart came out differently, and that’s exactly what we wanted!

The one above was actually finished in class, but I didn’t get a photo of it. However, most were close to done by the end of the two hour class. My friend Kathy sent me a picture of her finished heart shortly after I got home, so it was clear that this was really a quick project.

Kathy K's finished project

I’m already planning a couple of new little projects for the late spring/summer. These small projects are perfect for learning the basics of beading on fabric and I want to continue them…if only to get more people addicted….er….started on beading!

While at the store, we gathered up several of the books they had available on bead embroidery. Who knew!!!! I had glanced at one of them before, but I’ll tell you right now, there is so much more to learn! I’m thinking my quilting is definitely going to just be a background to my beading for many, many of my upcoming projects. Can’t wait to get started…oh, and I’ll need a few more beads!

KEQ-Wacky-Always Something New!

Art quilt group today…working on collage information. I’ve taken a couple of collage workshops now and so have a couple of the other ladies, so we brought our “stuff” and pooled our knowledge. Remember, “stuff” is our favorite supply and we surely brought a lot of it.

We had bags and piles and boxes of stuff–I think we are all pack rats at heart. And, no surprise, we all had plenty of stuff from which to work. It was nice to hear that the basic premise of collage making was the same for all of us….start with a foundation of some kind and build on it. Basically, just do it with whatever you like to work with. (Grammatically incorrect, but I’m sure you get what I mean!)

Kathy S. and I both like really bright, shiny, glitzy stuff so she started right off with the bright and shiny.

This is the only other picture I took, but Linda and Denise started collages that were more paper based and Julia began hers with fabric with high contrast colors and some buttons. The rest of us just talked and showed what we were working on. I know that I was not ready to start another project right now, so I brought stuff and info and examples and then just talked, but we always learn so much from each other.

Next meeting will be a work session for our next challenge–making a ME quilt. We are tasked with creating a representation of ourselves…no other rules, no restrictions. Should be verrrrrry interesting!

And Now…Wiffle-waffle

Decisions and more decisions are lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce out at me and make me change my mind about 100 times…I made my background and here’s how to do it in case you aren’t familiar with free-form piecing.

I stack up all my fabrics–for this one I actually have 10 different pieces of fabric–then I cut curvy lines. The next step is to rearrange the pieces in each stack and then sew the strips together again. When my ‘blocks’ are ready, I can arrange them and sew to make a background like this.

That’s the easy part…no decisions hiding there. It’s when I start putting the pieces back up that I start to wonder…is it too busy?

Shall I take some of the pieces out? The green ones or the orange framed ones?

Borders or no border?

What if I turn the background and make it more vertical than horizontal?

And then the questions pounce out all over again…….!

Time to quit and spend some time thinking. Maybe the questions will hide away and miss me the next time I work on this!

Geometry and Sewing?

Geometry was never my strong suit…I was a good math student, but the spatial aspects of geometry were not easy for me so I don’t know why I thought I could make this piece.

I want to piece these little sections together…a geometry nightmare!! WHAT was I thinking? I could add hunks of fabrics and then trim or add until the cows come home and never get this piece together! I’m whining, sure, but this deserves a little whining. I set myself up for failure, so now I have to re-think my strategy.

Look at those angles…no way am I going to piece these blocks together

I have quite a few pieces of hand-dyes in this same magenta family that I think will work well together, so I think I will piece together a large background and then applique or fuse the blocks to it.

Perhaps a sliver of the turquoise in the background, too, and I have a ton of other fabrics that go with this for finishing decisions.

Still can’t believe how foolish I was to think I could figure out all those angles and piece this…tsk, tsk, tsk!

Fabric Challenge

Been working on Karen Musgrave’s vintage fabric challenge. I’ve had a few projects in between the last time I worked on it and now, but I think it’s finally finished. We were supposed to use this fabric and work in the style of Rayna Gillman’s new book, Create Your Own Free-Form Quilts. That part was easy, since that’s how I work anyway. Well, you all know that I am a rule-breaker, but I really did start out being good!

   The only alteration to the fabric I made was to give some of it a little bleach bath, and then I started making strips.

 

When I compared my strips to what I saw in Rayna’s book, I felt that she works with much smaller pieces than I do. It’s hard to get a true perspective when you don’t see the actual pieces, even if the finished measurements are given. My strips just felt chunky, so I kept cutting and re-sewing some of the fat pieces until I got a strip set I liked.

I didn’t get very far along when I had the impression that the fabric, even in it’s original state, just wanted to become flowers in a garden…so that’s what I made!

Free form flowers, fused to a background of strips with dark top and bottom borders. No side borders–that felt too confining, but a little bit of funky at the bottom. Not quilted, yet, but I have the hardest part, the design part, done. The piece is quite small, but it feels like the perfect size to tell it’s own story.

I don’t usually show pictures that aren’t properly lit, but I was just taken with the way the sun was shining on this one.

Thanks for the challenge, Karen. I have a small box of assorted vintage fabric pieces that I ‘inherited’ but none are as challenging as what you shared with us! This was lots of fun.

And here’s a little additional challenge info…when I got this ready to quilt, I put it back up on the design wall for a few minutes. I was clearing off a few things from my cutting table and found some organdy that I had dyed. On a whim, I put it up on the board with this piece and now I want to put a lime green organdy ruffle around the outside edge and quilt leaves with neon green thread!  Am I crazy?

  

Done, Again! Wahooooo!

Love it when I finish a piece! No name for this one yet, but I’m getting several projects so close to done I can hardly stand it. Hate to wait for paint or fabric to dry, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do!

And not one single bead on it!

Here's a detail.

This one is quilted and bound, not mounted on stretcher bars. But mounting is always an option for the future…sometimes collages are not sturdy and should never be rolled up for storage. We’ll see…

Wedding Gift

Had a fun visit from Richard and Emily this weekend. I had given them their choice of a wall hanging for a wedding present and we were finally able to make connections so they could choose. And there is a very good reason for letting people select their own art…we all have different tastes!

They looked through a whole pile of possibilities…even I hadn’t realized how many pieces I had until I started sorting through. Traditional as well as non-traditional pieces. I’ve been making these things a loooooooooong time! It’s always music to the ego to have people like what you produce, but it was even more fun because they liked some of my favorite non-traditional pieces better.

Richard really liked a couple of my quick start quilting pieces. But he and Emily were relatively quickly able to narrow down their choices and this is what they selected.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

And because I’ve known Richard since he was a little boy, of course I gave him his choice of the quick start piece he wanted! These are the ones he liked and he chose the light one.

And to top off my day, I had a meeting with Marie at Pentamere Winery right here in town and was able to set up dates for an exhibit of my work. August, wine, art quilts..now I need to make sure everything is set up for a professional presentation.

Little things like labels and sleeves and mounting small pieces on canvas or just on paper and in an envelope. I’ve been better lately at the finishing details, but, remember that stack of quilts that Richard and Emily started with? I was surprised at how many of those did not have either labels or sleeves! And many of the smallest pieces were just laying in a heap…finishing details, that must actually get done!

Let’s see how long my finishing resolve lasts.