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Archive for the ‘Machine Quilting’ Category

Creative Quilting With Beads–it’s on the way!

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

Great news…. the Lark book with 8 projects by the Frayed Edges is now available!!!!

Creative Quilting With Beads

I’ve ordered copies, and as soon as they arrive you’ll be able to order up an autographed copy (or unmarked if you prefer… either way is great!) here. I have also obtained a supply of the drop beads I used, so if folks want, let me know and I can add a baggie of enough beads to make one journal cover to the store site if there is any demand for them.

I am so proud of ALL of the Frayed Edges! Four of the five of us submitted proposals, we were all accepted and we are either

  • on the cover (my pomegranate notebook cover, which you can see here)
  • on the table of contents (Deborah)
  • on the Introduction pages (Deborah and Kate)
  • or the FIRST project in the book (Kathy!)

WOW! Here are some pictures and a bit of a review of the book:

After the elation of learning a while ago that my project was on the cover, it only got better as soon as I opened the book. Here is the table of contents, with part of Deborah‘s Cobblestones piece on the lower right:

Table of Contents

Then I turned the page to the Introduction, which repeats Cobblestones and has BOTH of Kate Cutko’s pieces (Broken Dishes and Petroglyph):

Intro

Then I turned to the projects, and it begins with Kathy Daniels‘ sea piece:

Kath’s project

Kate’s Petroglyph panel (one day at one of our regular Frayed Edges meetings, we decided the beads were too bright and shiny, so we sandpapered them and stained them with leftover coffee!):

Kate’s

Deborah’s landscape triptych with her signature writing on her fabrics (one of her THREE projects!):

Deborah

The layout of the book is good–nice and clean, clear instructions, concise (I tend to go into LOTS of detail!). The projects look as though they could all be fairly easily and quickly accomplished (once you get the “stuff” you need for them anyway!). A basics and tips/ideas section starts the book, then it progresses to the projects, which are nicely illustrated and beautifully photographed! I hope the photography in my book turns out as well as this! Apart from the Frayed Edges projects, there were a couple I loved, and I could see doing a riff on this bag in an art quilt:

Seaweed bag

The projects shown could easily be adapted to use in your own art work or done as is… way cool.

At the end of the book is a gallery of inspiring pieces. These are much more in-depth, complicated works of art from some of the top art quilters today. It would probably be impossible to pattern these works of art (if the artists would even be willing), but they show what you can do with the techniques learned in the book. Just let yourself loose and PLAY! Which is what I hope to do when I get back from teaching in Paducah.

I should be home on April 27th, and the books for sale should be here that week. I’ll start shipping as soon as I’m unpacked!

Free-motion for art quilters

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

Double-duty projects (aka the grim phrase killing two birds with one stone) is becoming a habit. I needed to make some samples for my still-not-finished (sigh) book on threadwork in quilting AND have different free-motion designs for the 3-bhour “Nearly No-Mark Machine Quilting” class I’ll be teaching this week. I made two… one on a pink batik, the other on a turquoise “batik solid.” I like the former much better, but still really like the patterns on the turquoise, just not the overall piece.

Pink quilt orbs

The pink one is done with about six different Superior Threads 40-wt. trilobal polyester (shiny like rayon but stronger and more lightfast) through the needle and a single medium-pink/coral Bottom Line (60-wt. poly) in the bobbin. I LOVE the design on this one. I’ve had this “thing” for circle, arcs and orbs lately, and this was a fun way to play with different quilting patterns. The thing I have found is that I prefer curvy shapes to actually quilt, but that to make them really stand out, I need to incorporate straight lines (either in separators or alternate background patterns).

Pink quilt detail

This detail shot let’s you see every stitch, and that I varied the shades of color slightly for effect. You can also see that what you look at isn’t so much the stitching line, as the puffy in-between shapes the lines create. See how much more the scroll (snails and spiky snails) stands out when I didn’t fill in the background? To see a larger version of this detail shot, click the thumbnail, below:

FMQ pink detail

Here’s the turquoise one, which I did first.

Turquoise quilt

A copule problems… the beautiful variegated thread I used for the “sashing” is too dark compared to the colors I used in the quilting, which seems to disappear. Oops. Also, the overall composition isn’t great, but oh well….   think of this as my Southern California quilting motifs:  sun, palm tree fronds, orange sections, stucco arcs (like the patterns on the stucco on the outside of my gramma’s house), sailboat sails, and Joshua trees.  This was a class sample not a work of art. Obviously. Clicking on the thumbnail below will open up a larger window/view:

FMQ Turq

The fill patterns are done on a fairly small scale…these pieces are approx. 18×18 inches, but it would be easy to scale them up to use as an overall quilting pattern for a lap quilt, say. Anyway, I hope you like them. Also hope the editors of my book like the, too!