PPM 2016

Had a lot of fun on Saturday at this years Past Presidents Mystery quilt sew.
It's always a chance when you pick fabrics from the scanty info you receive ahead of the day.

This was by far the most modern quilt they have offered. It's only 60 inches sq, so I spent some time lat evening with my EQ6 trying to determine if and how I could enlarge it. The limitation of course is the amount of the original fabric I started with. So that may not happen.

It was a rather chaotic event. Get all those women sewing and ironing and chatting.....LOL
It was hard to visualize what went where. The instructions were a little too "picture oriented" for certainty. Consequently I had to re-cut and resew parts of this today. Looking at it, finished, I'm thinking it will probably be worth unstitching the top right corner to correct the block joints. I had replaced 4 blocks in the area. They were the wrong colours and I tried to insert them, but I didn't quite get the corners right. That's for tomorrow.

All that empty space just calls for some interesting quilting!

Keeping Busy

So what have I been doing the last few days?

Half the quilt is assembled. The blue square to the left and centered in the length is the middle of my round the world version of Jane's Stickle's quilt. Sewing them together solved a lot of issues. They were not all perfect but the sashing smoothed out a lot of irregularities and easing them together allowed them all to make a good show.

When I wasn't working on that,  I worked on the show mount for my Guild piece.

This double mounted.
In honour of the silver anniversary of the guild I added a silver flange inside the black binding. Then I stitched it to a canvas weight piece of green flannel. The whole piece floats in front of the green.
This is probably for the show only. It may be a bit to grand to place on the sales block. We'll see. I have this guy until May.

CQA Final

This little guy is finished.
I don't think I do "whimsy" very well. I'm not on solid ground there.
But this made hubby laugh.
I guess he liked it!

CQA Challenge - Day 3

Played a bit this morning. I think I'm almost there.
The two birds (with black paper dots for eyes) will need to be heavily thread painted to rise above the intense leaves.

But I can't play anymore.
We're off to Toronto for the day.
My stepdaughter has work in an art show   -       http://www.theartistproject.com/
and its a command performance/appearance for Dad.

Her art is lovely and its a wonderful bonding medium for us.
This will be a fun day.
Bonus is my younger son will join us.
Don't see any of them enough. They live such busy lives.

CQA Challenge Version 1 - Pure Whimsy

I had to get some of this out of my system.
They are all stuffed, enveloped and given a contrasting insert.
I finished each with embroidery stitching but I have a very limited amount at my disposal.

I originally envisioned the leaves grouped at the bottom falling off the edge..............

The leaves may be too big, or too many. They're only pinned on.

And in the middle of the night I decided to make a birds nest with the branches in the print.


I LOVE my little nest. It worked out well. The chicks are the birds from the print.
I was thinking about added a pair of adults
.

The balance is not right.
But that's another day.
Maybe simpler?
I still have a lot of fabric.

What's Next?

The next thing to get off my plate is the CQA Challenge, the Trendtex Fabric Challenge.

I was neither impressed with the theme, or the fabrics, so this too sat for months. I've had this fabric since October, waiting for it to speak. "Living a Life in Green" It's totally mute.

Lizards and Frogs come to mind and I have a feeling that's going to be done to death.

Yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaa.............!

I decided to go with leaves.
So I started this today. Cut generous sized leaves from all but the multi coloured one.

As all I CAN use are these fabrics, I decided to go with a tactile display. 3D if you will.

And I'll tart them up with the colours in the remaining piece of material.
But what to do with it?
I had thought of cutting it all up and making the branches into a birds nest. .............
Cutting out the birds and making them stuffed?

There are issues......I have issues.
We'll see where this goes.
In the mean time I'll make LEAVES
I have till April.

GCQ - Devil's Advocate with a Pandora's Box

I trimmed up the piece this morning and was hunting for binding colours when my eye passed over a tool I often use on small pieces......
A FRAME with WHITE MATTING - ( OH NO ...options?)

Though it's total impractical for eventually shipping this piece to BC, its fun to look at the possibilities. So here is the canvas trimmed with a half in margin.

But look what happens when I frame this baby!

It's an entirely different piece. Now this is a generous frame but it cropped part.
If I shift the frame.....

a totally different feel and picture.

SIGH... so many considerations.
So I'll DEFINITELY put this aside for a while, (I have a over a month until its needs to be handed in,) and move on!

Guild Challenge Quilt - 25th Anniversary - Final

25th Anniversary, 25 shades of Grey....19"x28"

This is still unbound and will probably end up being self bound. For now I can turn to other things.

GCQ - I went Bigger!

All it took was 10 minutes of choosing the fabric and pinning it in place.

Looks great but.....
I did draw trimming lines down each side in black marker a few days ago. I could stitch with colours over them and it would muddy the lines enough they would disappear.

 or

I could add two trees.

This won't take much to blend them in.
And in the end...if I do decide I want less left bottom.......I can cut it all off.
2:00pm
Spent most of the day working up to two edges to blend them into the centre.
After thread painting white, black and silver leaves over snippets of cloth leaves, I added green gauze and finished the edges with evergreens.
Once the two new tree trunks are given wool and stitching, everything will be at the same place and I can move on to finish.

I Do like this bigger.

New right edge

New left edge

Edge trees stitched and stained with ink

                                                                                        

GCQ - So Close to Finished

This is SOOO close.
But now I have another dilemma.
I have been cropping this piece to the finished width dimensions and chopping off the bottom.

BUT and its a big BUT,..... I like the bottom and how it worked up.
To restore a pleasing dimension, I would need to ADD to both of the sides.

Not that difficult. Its simply a matter of sky and trees.
So here are the two options. I'll think on this for a few days before I act.

Standard cropping

un-cropped but needing additions

Inching along - GCQ

I spent some time this morning finishing the ground area on the right side, the lighter side.
Then I got out my Black ink sticks and gave all the brown, and bright white areas a very light grey wash. I want to bring the intensity of the colour down.
I will do this several times letting it dry between applications until I reach a more realistic colour for early evening.

I'm still hesitating on finishing the left, darker side. I can't visualize what I want yet.

You may be challenged to notice any differences at all.

Heading for the Finish Line - GCQ

This piece has taken too long. Part of it was my indecision and part was other things pushing it aside. A busy week kept me from even thinking about it.
Now I find future work is threatening to interfere, so it's time to just DO IT!

One of the triggers for today's energy was I needed an example of light and shadow to take to my landscape group that meets once a month. Light has been our theme and this month's assignment ( my suggestion) was to put light into a landscape, other than fabric colours.
As I lay awake in bed, I decided to follow the advice I'd given a friend just yesterday: if you're not sure, use crayon or coloured pencil. You can control the intensity until you're sure enough to finish it in thread.
So I added some shadow to my major trees.

And then I added some more trees, at the back in the front, some old and some young, representative of an active healthy forest. ( I also enlarged my people on the bridge.)

I had been undecided about filling the foreground with trees but now that I have started doing just that, in the mid ground, it just seems a natural.

I'm also toying with the length of this piece. Photoshop is great for this stuff.

Maybe a Bridge?

Prespective is everything.
I've tried a few different bridge styles and the best I've come up with so far is this rendition.

And yes, there are people on my bridge, ink on paper still. The bridge isn't stitched either.
It wasn't until I added the two supports under the bridge and the teeny people that it actually looked like what it was supposed to be.
The vegetation behind them is now the wrong size but that's fixable.

This is tiny.
It's something to be stumbled upon in passing, but it satisfies, for me, anyway the urge to have my eye travel to that spot.
I suppose it began as an error in fabric choice, but I continued working with it until it felt right.
It also give a much greater sense of depth to the piece.

Done. Told you it was small.

Optical illusion - GCQ

There is one spot that's been bothering me for a while. It has to do with the fabric used there , a black and white print.

It looks like a bridge to me.

I'm undecided here. I could accent it and include a bridge ( how romantic) or ignore it and camouflage it.

In the mean time I added some larger shrubs using the thread on wash-away again. Rinsed them with HOT water and quick dried with the hair dryer. These were stitched into place. ( 4 )

Off MY feet but Back to the Woods

Doing two quilts back to back was hard work. My legs, shoulders and neck often ached at mid day so I took breaks by working on my DJ
I started piecing this together with my feet on a hassock and a glass of wine at my elbow. Couldn't be nicer. Stitched in pairs then 4 then 16. This shouldn't take too long. And all those little "I'll fix it later"...... get fixed  now.

This afternoon I FINALLY turned back to the GCQ, 25 Shades of Grey.
I wanted to revisit embroidery on the wash-away stabilizer. The first time had been a mess because I washed the glue away without pinning the pieces. This time I washed them and dried them while they were pinned. Other than their being a bit stiff as the glue was not all washed away, I could cut and trim them with now difficulty. These are tiny pieces. ( I really didn't want the headache of thread painting over all the layers I had already applied.. I'll save that for the bigger pieces.)

I wanted some very small herbs and ferns and as this is moon lit, pale, using a variegated thread allowed me to build up up lighter and darker areas.

I cut these into a strip and heavily pinned every tip so they wouldn't curl during washing and drying.

Then I glued them into position. I can stitch them down later when I start sewing on this piece again.

I saved the lightest ones for the areas in the moonlight.

Most of these went on the edges of the ravine.










They may be too small to show in this photo, but they add subtle colour and soften the transitions between rock and soil, light and dark.

I'm happy with this. Tomorrow I'll make more!

Beautiful Quilt Gone Home

I finished this beauty this afternoon and my friend was so excited she fetched her baby after supper this evening. LOL
This was a big project but it went smoothly.
I took a lot of photos, primarily for my records but here are a few.
When the binding is on and the quilt on her bed, my friend promised another photo.

flimsey

finished quilting

These colours are so lush I didn't know which to publish..enjoy!

All decision made

There were two hold ups with this quilt.
The final pattern for the wreaths around the Stars????? There were a few false starts.

Done.

And I wanted to test this marker before I used it on this quilt.
This is a Clover "air erasable" pen. I've been using it for months now but not on customer pieces.
It's never failed to totally disappear in 24 hrs but I wasn't sure whether this would hold true on the tone on tone white of the background.

But it did....and guess what? I'm half way thru the feathering of this Queen size beauty.
I'll go back for the Stars.
Lots of thinking yet on that part!