Project Quilting 12-6

 Ab Intra

  For the final challenge of Project Quilting for 2021, Trish really pulled out an obscure theme. Ab Intra, which means "from Inside".  Ohhh.. I had to think about this one for a while. What represents the me inside? What image would tell you something about me and what motivates me? 

   I always Loved making art from a young age and I continued to create art in various mediums over the years. I went to college and studied Commercial art and got a degree in teaching art. I also started taking pottery classes there and, after graduating, I apprenticed myself to a potter. For years, I travelled the Southeast selling pottery art art and craft shows until I got married. In college I also took several photo classes. I learned to love the Adams approach to photography, composing in the camera instead of manipulating in the darkroom. Over the years, I've transitioned from 35 mm film to digital and all the progress digital has made. I have a small collection of cameras from different ages. My favorite came from my great uncle David. 

   Photography, in general, has aided me in my art in other mediums, increased my skills at composing, and I've even begun selling photo-based images on Spoonflower. 

     What is my favorite thing to do? I love to walk in nature. I love to photograph nature and take moments to look closely at the nature elements. I believe that we will discover much more about how trees and plants communicate with each other. (Yes I've seen the documentaries) I love the  Japanese concept of "Forest Bathing". 

  I love family history and (on top of being an artist who finds value in things many don't) I ALSO have the issue of imparting life in objects (like my great uncle's camera). It leads me to have a clutter of stuff, but they become my cocoon of love, memories, touchstones. 

  Finally, ever since I've been young, I've enjoyed what they now call Americana. I attended the local folk festival (even skipped school to do it) because I really loved the concept of saving our old ways. It might have coincided with the craft resurgence of the Bicentennial, but  I was impressionable and it has  lasted in many ways in my life. Now that I live in the Missouri Ozarks, I have continued to have the opportunity to enjoy the folkways of our forefathers. I fervently hope that after Covid is over and we open up more, Baker's Creek will have their festivals once more. My love and interest in Americana directed my desire to work at Silver Dollar City. While they have world class rides, the overall theme of the park in old times and that means that I wear a long dress, pantaloons, and knee socks every day to work (even the summer). Most of the fabric our dresses are made of comes from Marshall Dry Goods in Batesville, Ar. The costume shop would have a sale of left overs every year (before covid) and it worked out to $1 a yard. Whenever I found fabric that matched my dress, I would be excited. It came in handy when I had to wear masks for covid. I could match my dresses. This year, they gave me enough to make matching masks for my new dresses. 

  I also sit next to the Dulcimer shop and, after 10 years, I finally found my perfect one and bought it. I had an old one from my early 20's but this one is SO nice! I have been practicing to play it better ever since. 

Capturing Me

18" x 14.5

   This depicts my love of taking photos of nature. In the lenses the fabrics are taken from a photo I have in Spoonflower that shows my neighborhood at sunset. (lakes and mountains) It shows my love of having family objects around me. It shows my love of music and the final border is from the fabric my dresses from work are made from. 

Project Quilting 12-5 Crazy Quilting

 Crazy Quilted Heart

Set it Free

6" x 3"

This week the challenge is Crazy Quilting. Another technique challenge, although I suppose anything that would make you "Crazy" would qualify. Crazy Quilting is, traditionally, a way of showing off your luxury fabrics (such as velvets, satins, lace, etc) AND your impressive skills at embroidery stitching, both on the joining of the fabrics and feature elements. I might have dug out some fabrics that qualified, but I wasn't in the mood. In addition, I'm not into hand stitching so I used the fancy stiches on my machine. 

  I'm in the process of making a piece I might submit to a show, so I had these fabrics laying around. I like the idea of making a heart without any nod to traditional colors. In the spirit of crazy quilting, I added yarn and beads and the butterfly made from a thin felt. It's actually from a piece I picked up from work. Life is Good hats are sent with these felt pieces to hold a shape of the hat but customers pull them out, they end up on the floor, and I gather them up. 

  I used a Sizzix cutter (I have one plate to make butterflies) To cut the butterfly. I also used this felt as a foundation for the fabrics and sewing the stitches. I then added the yarn and beads (xo for love and kisses) and then stitched the entire thing to black felt. After I took the picture on my design wall, I added a pinback so I could wear it. 

  My husband said this reminded him of that saying in the 60's/70's that said:

"If you Love something, set it free.

If it comes back, it's yours, if it doesn't, it never was." 

So, here it is pinned onto a jean jacket. 

Project Quilting 12-4 Snail Trail block

 We have Snow! 

I've been looking out the window a lot this week. I'm not a big fan of cold, but I like when there's snow on the ground. So, as I finished up my quilt today, this is the accumulation of the snow... so far... it's still snowing here. It's a fine snow, so it's taken quite a while for it to pile up around here. It's fun looking out this window and remember all the years my kids would be out there playing and sledding. Such wonderful memories. If I get motivated, I'll take a walk to the Lake and take some pictures there. It's been a while since we have gotten this much snow and our lake is so deep it doesn't freeze. Anyway, onto the challenge...

The Cats are Cold

25" x25"

I had done a snail trail block a few times in the past so I was familiar with it but I was adamant I was NOT going to make a bigger quilt this time. Still, snail trail lends itself to the best impact being repeated in several blocks... But I really didn't want to make a big quilt. I found this one on Pinterest which uses just one snail trail for it's tails and then simple blocks for the rest of the cats. It seemed like something I could sketch out easily. I saw it made both like this and with a snowballed corner on the cat body. I liked keeping it more geometric. 

Every source I looked at for making a 12" BLOCK, gave different cutting instructions. I decided to make an 8" BLOCK and cut the pieces , 5 1/4", 3 3/4", 3', and 2", then sub cut the first 3 into half squares on the diagonal.

I practiced, and started on my precious Cherrywood fabric. These cats are using some fabric from the  "Alaskan Sunset" collection. I liked the humor of using that in the week of sub freezing temperatures. 

Both of my girls, who are living on their own, decided to own cats. We have had cats while they were growing up, but now we have the two dogs and no cats after ours have passed away from old age. So, it's a tribute to Psyche, Bob, Luke and Star. Maura's Luke is quite the scene stealer in her Zoom classroom. Cats are fun.  

So, what did I learn this time? I am usually clueless about quilting. This week, I became a bit more adventurous about free motion quilting. I gave myself permission to play and not be perfect. I also tried sewing a binding on totally by machine. I sewed it on the back and flipped to the front and I used a foot called a piecing foot guide which kept my stitches running right along the edge. I was mostly pleased with that experiment too. 

I had some thread breakage. I noticed when I went to block the piece, the water evaporated quickly. I'm wondering if the humidity was affecting my thread.. or if it's just too old? Maybe I should just get rid of it? Not sure. 

Calling this challenge done and happy with what I've learned. 

Project Quilting 12-3 Virtual Vacation

 Virtual Vacation

It's cold in the winter here and, unlike last year with it's spectacular sunrises, this has been gray (oh so gray) with few actual snowfalls to brighten up the place. I would normally think about a trip, but Covid has squashed that thought. I just need to be happy snuggled up in my house with my quilt making. The theme this week made me remember a couple years ago when I was able to spend a couple weeks at the beach in the Emerald Coast of Florida. Destin and Pensacola area, where the beaches are sugar sand and every day was a different version of a beach paradise. Sigh! I photographed so much and I have so many spectacular views of that area, I decided to upload them to Spoonflower and have them printed. I wanted to work in some of the proofs I made as well. 

 My shop is called  "Elijahbluewallacestudio" 

Gold Coast Dreams 

44.5" x 40.5" 

I used a larger print of a sunset and then added in a few smaller pieces of proofs and colorful fabrics. The darker fabric I used looked informally woven and I liked how it made the brighter pieces pop. 

A closeup of the pieces show some of the different sizes of the Pensacola Beach sign I had printed. This is the vintage sign, which they recently replaced. It was so well loved, the new one really mimics the old one in design. Then, of course we ALL have scraps of fabrics around and they just seem to multiply. You would think this project might have gotten rid of a lot, but no... still a bin full. 

  Quilting (my nemesis) Continues to frustrate me. I used a pastel thread for the whole piece, mimicking the cloud lines in the sky and then carrying that down onto the sand area. The borders are all stitched a simple back and forth (wiggly at times) in different directions, crossed in the corners. 

  I'm seeing a trend this year of making basically a baby quilt sized quilt every time so far and I am pushed to finish in time. I like how I was able to use some of my spoonflower proofs. I don't know why I'm making this size this year. 

  I was talking with my daughter the other day and I mentioned just how much PQ has started to influence my fabric choices. Opening my eyes to a different esthetic for sure. 

Now for a totally off topic bit-

One day this week, I had to go out and mail off packages (including the cherrywood challenge) and I decided to get my hair cut. I was able to get an appointment fairly easily and I walked in and tried to explain what was going on with my hair.  The simple truth is that I shed hair. A lot. All the time. Everywhere. Then I also grow hair, constantly losing and growing. I am not a fussy person and I gave up with styling it a long time ago. Thus, I usually just washed my hair, then put it in a ponytail or sometimes braided it and let it go. That meant that when I was shedding hair, it was a very long piece of hair. So I had layers of length from 3 ft to about 4 or 5 inches, depending on the stage of growth. So anyway, my only instruction was to try to make it look better. So, quite a bit of the length is now gone, it's layered to work in the new growth and the bangs are also part of that. 

  My husband's first comment was to ask me why my hair looked like platinum blond . I had to laugh at him. Didn't notice that literally feet of hair was missing, it was just whiter. So, there you go. My gray shows up more. Other than my husband, there's really no one else to see it except at an occasional trip to the grocery store. I'm sure no one there really cares. 

Project Quilting 12-2

 Fussy Cutting

This challenge was a real challenge for me, which is a good thing, because that's the reason why we do it. 

The first challenge was to find a fabric I wanted to work with. I tend to use solids, atmospheric sorts of fabrics, batiks, etc.. all the sorts of fabrics that I can manipulate for art quilts I make. Finding a good pattern that was large enough to fussy cut was going to be a challenge. 

We all have random fat quarter packs that have pieces you like and some ... not so much. I looked through these and found a cute little deer print. I had enough images that I could make a small quilt of 9 blocks with these deer as the center. 

Back to my stash for coordinating fabric and, again, challenged! Just not a lot of the colors I like to use and, again, hit up those odd fat quarter pieces, or remnants of other projects. I made some math mistakes and cutting mistakes and generally grew frustrated with this project. Revisions upon revisions of my original idea gave me a basic plan and resurrecting some really ancient stash fabrics and I had a plan. 

So this is a close up of my feature fabric. Cute right? 

I ended up with a design plan that gave me an opportunity to Make an applique of the deer and other elements from the print. I'm just now realizing I'm doing an applique element like I did in 12-1 challenge. Sigh! It's wasn't intended but solved a problem. Anyway, I thought it needed it and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. 

To make the deer, I used a photo of the deer to enlarge and create a pattern for my applique. I added a few flowers from the scraps I used for the blocks to add design elements matching those in the feature fabrics. 

Speaking of using elements from the feature print, I used some elements like stars, clouds and swirls to form my quilting lines. I drew them out using heat sensitive pens. With the exception of making a star template, it was basically just free drawn. It was easily followed in the lighter fabrics, much harder to follow in the darker block areas and, in the end I just sketched out the stars and just decided to "wing it" for the rest. I was happy to try a new technique. I was frustrated at times. I don't think it ends up looking absolutely fabulous and I'm happy that it doesn't make much of a visual impact in the end. It's quilted and that's about the best I can say about it. 

Deer One 

42" x 38.5

Final thoughts. Man! Quilting and binding is my very least favorite part of making quilts. It's always a struggle for me. But, I sure remember the first time I was able to upgrade my sewing machine to one that CAN do free motion quilting. It was a game changer for me. But time has moved on and, unless I win a quilting machine, I'll still struggle with this part. 

I was very happy to find a home for some of these odd pieces of fabrics that have been lingering in my stash for years (if not decades). 

Limits in coordinating fabrics and the limited amounts of such fabrics (not to mention a few mistakes) defined this design. It's a true "Make it work" project. I think it turned out ok in the end. Thanks Ya'll. 

PQ 12-1 Illumination +ultimate gray

 It's that time again!

Project Quilting season 12 begins! This week's theme was based on the pantone colors of yellow and gray. I have been drawn to grays lately but yellow! As much as I always think I need to get yellow in my stash, it's always the color I have the least of and is the most challenging for me to find something I like. 

   When I began working on this, I was still working, so it was a struggle to head into the sewing room after I had 8 hours of bending and stretching to count the store. I knew it had to be something simple to get it done in a week. I had found the bee fabric in a small shop in upstate New York last year. I recognized it from a fabric line I had seen at Houston Market years before and had only been able to find the blue colorway locally. I originally thought I could use it in a bee quilt I was working on, but, in the end, it really didn't fit in. The gray I had in my stash and it's an interesting gray wood grain pattern and the yellow is two different shades of yellow from my Cherrywood stash. 

  The  Quilt is a super simple design like the beginning of a "Trip around the World". I added the bees on Wednesday  when I realized I was done working for the season and it could use a bit more interest.

  Someone asked about how I made the bees. They are a raw edged applique, sewn on with a satin stitch. I basically cut out the black and slipped the white and yellow in between the black and the quilt top. 

  To quilt it I just did a basic grid with diagonal crosses both ways. This was my first time trying out a mid tone thread as I talked about in my last post here so I picked Lilac! I like it too. It will be something I will consider again in the future. 

Bee mine 40"x40"

 So here's my entry this week all quilted. The binding is the same as the backing, another gray patterned fabric. Finished in a week.