Over the next few days I'll show you where I'm heading with some of these projects I'm working on. Today and tomorrow I'm at sewing days with Country School Quilters so I'll catch you up on that golden oldie UFO on Monday. Today we'll check in on the postcard pile. But first, a funny story. I've decided that I "need" a wet saw for my glass work. One day this week I was running errands so decided to stop by Harbor Freight, Home Depot and Lowe's to start getting educated. I couldn't even get acknowledged at Harbor Freight, at Home Depot the saws are on a high shelf so having the "out" to look at is kind of useless but I did get some "help". I was asking the guy on each saw where the water comes from. I wanted to know exactly where the water hits the blade. He pointed to a spot and told me that the water came from there directly on the blade....so apparently the laser light doubles as a water spout! The guy at Lowe's actually did know what he was talking about. I'm very excited to get a saw soon! Of course the blades cost as much as the saw. Glass cutting blades are incredibly expensive. So back to the postcards. Here's what I'm working with. These are the cut offs from the fabric for the wedding quilt that Mom is piecing. There are slivers and some chunks that are about 7" long and between 2 and 4" wide. A smart person would have tossed all those strings out but, hey by this point you are not surprised that I can't do that. No big surprise (nor a creative leap) that I went right for a horizon image. Of course this could go either way up. I kind of like it but it needs something else for sure and I don't know what that is yet. Some of the bits are wider so I thought of a possible cityscape. I do like this but I don't have a lot of yellow fabric. I do have tons of purple bits in 4 shades so I might try this with purple buildings on a yellow background because I have plenty of the bigger yellow chunks. Then I remembered that I had some bits from the rainbow quilt that are too small to sew together and tried out a rainbow city. The black is leftover from the rainbow quilt too. This has some serious possibility but I do not like the purple sky for this.
I tend to like to work on these in the evenings after dinner (or supper in the South) so maybe I'll have an update soon. I do need to get something together because there are a lot of birthdays in the next few months and I give one to each of our Airbnb guests so I go through them at a pretty fast pace. First off, I want to thank you all for the overwhelming response and kind comments about my wall. I'm glad you like it as much as I do and if there's one lesson that I can share from this project it's this: just start somewhere. Don't try to plan everything out, just start and let the project unfold as it needs to. I started with the framework and then just tackled it one clamshell at a time and it eventually came together. After I finish a large project I like to take a day or 2 to regroup and reorganize all of my projects and spaces and get myself on track for another few months. This time I had the added carrot of a new challenge project from my quilt club, Country School Quilters. They are starting a challenge quilt series. It's a low stress project with only a couple of rules for each challenge and I've been on the fence about joining in. So I decided to think through all of my current projects and available workspaces to see if I wanted to jump in. Let's take a look, shall we. On the big sewing table with my Juki I have the scraps from the Rainbow Quilt spread out and I have an idea of where I want to go with them. There are lots of scraps so there's a whole new quilt in here and I'm very excited about the directing this is heading. On the small sewing table with the Brother machine are tiny bits from the wedding quilt that I cut out for Mom and from the Rainbow Quilt. I've got several postcard ideas working here and this is great late night mindless sewing. Let's not forget about the symmetry quilt blocks either. They have their own dedicated design wall and I work on cutting out the blocks sitting on the floor in front of the open cabinet. This is an easy project to get out, work on for an hour or so and then put away. I keep a separate project to work on at the monthly CSQ sewing days (this month that's tomorrow and Saturday) and I have been very anxious to get to this one once the rainbow quilt tops were done. This is my oldest UFO and one that I still love. Just the borders left to go. I'll post more about it next week On FloMo I've loaded the last of the Rainbow quilt tops. This small quilt will be a class sample for my Ruling Rulers class at The Longarm Network. It shouldn't take long to finish. While the cutting table is clear I'm going to get this marked so that it will be the next thing quilted on FloMo. After that I have at least 10 veterans quilts waiting and probably 8 more of my own quilts. Oh, and let's not forget that there's a new wall section coming up and I'm making fused glass fish for the backsplash for my dye sink!
So, after taking stock of what's currently on my plate and realizing that I didn't want to trade any of them out, I've decided to not participate in the challenge quilts....for now. Thank you for all of the lovely comments and feedback on my Great Wall. It was a lot of work to get all of the photos edited and the page written but someday I'll have to move from this house and I wanted a good record of the wall. Now I'm on to starting another section. But for today I'm back to dyeing and I have 2 new Stash Packs to share. I love the Stash Packs. They are the most fun to dye (although the least fun to iron and pack) and they offer endless possibilities for our projects. They are great in scrap quilts like my Rainbow Quilt and also great for landscape art quilters who need lots of variety but not large pieces. That's all for this week but I'm in the dye studio today working on more new fabrics.
It was finally warm enough this past weekend to open the windows so I could grout the last section of the wall. It tool 7 hours Saturday but I got it all done! I am beyond thrilled with it. If you want to read about the history and see lots of photos you can check them out in the mosaic gallery.
See those 2 white sections on the right side with the "beads"? That's a hint to the next wall section that I'll start soon! I've had several friends emptying wine and other spirit bottles for me lately so I've been running some of them through the kiln. I've added several new slumped bottles to the shop. For 2017 I'm donating $5 of every sale to WHEAT, our local food bank. I have a couple of new slumping molds too. This one is a tree of life that looks best on clear bottles. This wavy design is designed specifically for tea light candles but I you could use it for anything you want. A couple of the special bottles are these two. One is a large pale blue bottle and the other is a Chateauneuf du Pape bottle.
You can see them all in the shop. I charge Medium Flat Rate shipping but refund anything over the actual cost of the shipping. |
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I'm Vicki Welsh and I've been making things as long as I can remember. I used to be a garment maker but transitioned to quilts about 20 years ago. Currently I'm into fabric dyeing, quilting, Zentangle, fabric postcards, fused glass and mosaic. I document my adventures here. Categories
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April 2024
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