I'm so fortunate to have so much creative space. I talked about the two sewing machines in my sewing room yesterday that are always ready for a project. FloMo, the Innova, is in the basement in it's own room so I can always be ready to quilt. With the closet full of veterans quilts I'm trying to do a couple each week to catch up. Plus my friends, Marcy and Denise, are helping me with some too! This one was made by Betsy using the Strength pattern. She's made some really nice quilts with that pattern. Yes, as a matter of fact, she did fussy cut the tiger batik fabric! This one was made by Karen, the queen of scrap quilts! This quilt really showed how she can make something from nothing. She started with some small crumb blocks that made with leftovers from a quilt I made years ago called Teal Tomorrow. The frames are all leftover backing fabric from veterans quilts! When I trim the quilts I save the sides of the backing pieces and pass them on to Karen. She put them all together in this quilt in a way that it looks like she designed it and picked out the colors. It's brilliant. This backing is one that I dyed a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't happy with the color and I intended to overdye it last Wednesday. But when I bought the stack of quilts home Tuesday night and this turned out to be perfect for these quilts! Sometimes everything works out.
Last week I shared my blue Shibori Sea postcards. When I was pulling out the scraps to make them I could lots of other colors of "sky" fabrics and got a little carried away. But I use my postcards so fast that making a lot of these simple designs wasn't a bad idea. Each set is simple: sky fabric (all are leftover postcard backing fabrics), sea Shibori fabric, yarn horizon and one element in the sky. I added a gull in the blue cards. In this one I used a metallic thread to stitch a hint of clouds in the sky.
I have 2 sewing machines in my sewing room. One is all set up for postcards and the other is set up for making dog blocks. I can sit down to work on either project without having to move anything. My mood can dictate what I work on. I only made a couple of these cards because I only had two pieces of the sky fabric. But I'm really happy with how they turned out. I'm calling them Autumn Sea. I really dislike July and August. The heat doesn't bother me at all but the humidity and mold here in Central Virginia is stifling. I have my allergies mostly under control the rest of the year but mold is my Achilles heel. That means that I mostly stay inside for 2 months of the year. That's a huge improvement over my situation 10 years ago but boy do I look forward to our Maine trip every summer! But until then, I'm an inside girl. I'm not good at working on one project at a time. I'll work on one thing for an hour or so and then switch to something else. Watching TV is hand sewing time. Because I sprained my ankle there's been a lot of TV time and this week I finished up another set of moons. At this point I have 45 done and 27 prepared and ready for stitching. I still don't know how big I'll make this but I'll probably just keep working on them and maybe I'll get more than 1 quilt from them. I think this one is my favorite of this group just because of the unusual coloring. I like hw the grayish lines blend right into the background. Very eerie.
Fabric of the WeekThe fabric of the week this week is Marigold. Marigold is a very bright orange that edges toward gold. It's on sale this week 20% off. I have fat quarter packs ready to ship. Cuts larger that fat quarters will be dyed and shipped in the next 2 week. Marigold coordinates with the Navajo Gradient. Sale ends Sunday! New Reflections!Reflections are fabrics with linear texture that were originally design to be water and sky elements in art quilts. But, of course, you can use them any way that you want. I've added 4 new ones this week. Check them all out in the shop.
My weekend plans went awry. I was looking forward to 2 sewing days with my Country School Quilters friends but when I got to the meeting room it was clear that someone had recently cleaned it. That's all good except that they used about a gallon of Pine-Sol. It's mold season here and I'm having enough allergy challenges. The Pine-Sol was just too much. I visited for a little but packed up and came home. Not to worry, I had plenty to do! At the club meeting last week members gave me 13 more veterans quilt tops! Then I got 2 in the mail from my friend, Patty. With the 3 that were already there I now had 18 quilt tops hanging in the guest room closet. The ones on the left are paired with backs. The ones on the right need backs. I got those backs dyed last week. So I decided that instead of poisoning myself I would come home and work on these veterans quilts. I quilted 2 quilts but realized that I can only share one. The other is a sample quilt for an upcoming Barbara Brackman block of the week/month. Becky does sewing for Barbara and the new quilt finished at 48" x 60" so she turned it into a veterans quilt.....a REALLY nice veterans quilt. All I can tell you is that it's a really cool quilt for those of you looking for a challenge! I have so many quilts to quilt that they are getting the fastest possible quilting. The Loose Leaf panto is perfect for that. This one is another one that Gwen mad with 4-patch blocks. This is the 3rd I've quilted for her and there are 2 or 3 more! Puppies!Then I was able to start making dog blocks. Is this puppy cute or what? I don't buy a lot of patterns but I'd surely buy more patterns from Sew Fresh Quilts. This one is really well written. The fact that I had to unsew something in ever block is only commentary on my sewing skills. I have 3 of them done. These blocks are big, 18" x 12" so the hand dyed fabric makes a nice impact.
I made some more progress on moons too. I almost have another set of 4 ready to share. Jeannette Ringuette was inspired a photograph of Moonfish. She liked the underwater fantasy effect of the Beach Walk gradient and the Yellow Red Shades Pack.. Other embellishments include stenciled fish, Angelina fibers, melted/painted Tyvek beads, founds objects in her stash appliqued or sewn on and fussy cut embellishments from netting fabric. The Moonfish were painted and appliqued along with their fins.
For sharing, Jeannette received a 20% coupon for the shop that's good for 3 months! If you have made anything with my hand dyed fabric I hope you will consider sharing it in the Customer Gallery. The only rule is that projects have to be complete. It doesn't have to be made totally from hand dyed fabric, just include a recognizable amount. Today and tomorrow I'll be sewing with my quilt club and that means I'll be working on my 4th of July quilt again. I'll have an update on that Monday but for today I'm excited to share what I've been working in all week. I can't hold off any longer. I need to start a new project. Just like you I have a dozen pattern and ideas for new projects. But my friend, Lora, has been not very subtle about her "need" for a quilt. She volunteers at Richmond Animal League and she is also owned by 2 dogs and 2 cats. So the quilt had to be about dogs and cats. Plus I was interested in doing a quilt with some sort of animal block. I like Elizabeth Hartman patterns and her Penguin parade quilt is also on my list. But Lora loves Pit Bulls so this pattern from Sew Fresh Quilts was perfect. This quilt is 60" and I wasn't really interested in a queen size quilt of only dog heads. So I picked up her cat pattern with the idea of doing cats in the border. Look at that blackbird quilt. Isn't that cute too? I'll just add that to the list too. Lora knows that I'm making this for her. I knew as soon as she saw the first block in Instagram that she would know the quilt was for her anyway. Since it's not a surprise she got to pick the background color and she picked blue. I didn't have a true plan last week but I had enough of an idea to go ahead and dye fabrics. The background of the dogs will be the light blue, then a 3" border of medium blue and the outside border in the dark blue. The fabrics for the blocks will be my "waste" fabrics that I love so much. The dogs and cats will have a tie dye look. Then it was time to put this in EQ and see how it looked. So I started with the center and, of course, the dog s look great. But then I got to the border and I didn't get very far before I realized that these cats would not work. Egads, that hideous! The cats look menacing. I tried dozens of really bad border ideas. Here are just a few. I tried several ways to keep those cats but Lora and I eventually realized that they just didn't belong. The bones were just too juvenile. That zig zag at the top was a border block from EQ and we liked that one. We both liked this one so I let that marinate in my brain overnight. In the end I decided that there was too much white in the border so I took off the outside white triangles. After I get this together I might consider adding a 2" dark blue border at the end but this is what I'm going forward with for now.
The pattern instructions for the dog blocks are very well written so I'm looking forward to jumping into this project next week. Dogs and cats are going to sleep on this quilt so I'm not going to stress for perfection. I just want it to be fun. Right before I sprained my ankle last week (ant it's totally healed now) I had started to make these postcards. We've had a lot of Airbnb guests this summer and I'm going through them pretty quickly. I wanted to make some really simple and quick cards. I remembered the Shibori Sunset cards that I made a few years ago. It just so happens that I have a big bin of shibori scrraps and another big bin of fused hand dyed scraps. I found a light blue pre-fused fora sky and blue shibori for the sea. I didn't take any process photos but this is pretty easy to figure out! It's sky fabric, water fabric and a piece of yarn for the horizon. They needed a little something else so each one got a little bird just drawn on with a Pigma pen.
I got the fusing done before my ankle hiatus and just finished the edging. The bins are still out so I think I'll see if I can create some more of these easy landscapes before I put everything away. Today is "dyeing day" and that reminded me to share a new top that I dyed for myself last week. This is a top that I dyed a couple of years ago. It's the Flower Power Top from Dharma Trading. It's got several things going for it that I love. It's soft cotton knit, it's very comfortable, it's manchine washable and it's long enough to completely cover my hiney. I love wearing it with cropped leggings. The only thing I don't love about it is the sleeve but that's a minor complaint. This year I ordered a couple more with great plans to get them dyed and they have been sitting on the shelf for over a month. I finally got motivated last week. Last Tuesday I was invited on a road trip to the Virginia Quilt Museum and I didn't have to drive. I took along one of the tops, a bag of glass florist marbles and my waxed sinew. In the car I wrapped marbles in the lower half of the top. I did not tie each individual marble. I just wrap each one a few times and pull tight. That hold the marble in well enough. I usually do low water immersion but I wanted the color in this top to be smooth solid so I did a full immersion dye and I'm really happy with the way it turned out. What I love about Dharma clothing is that the thread used for construction is cotton so it dyes too. It took a lot less time that I expected to tie this dress and I'm glad I remembered that I had it to work on during the car ride. Now I need a design idea for the second one that I bought. There's a little shop across from the Viginia Quilt Museum that sells kind of Bohemian clothing. I usually find something that I "need" in there. One of the things I needed this time was this tshirt that seemed to have been made for me! If you need one you can get it from Tie Dye Dan, a business in Harrisonburg.
Fabric of the WeekThe fabric of the week is Riverside Gradient. It's 20% off all this week. Patricia Caldwell used Riverside in The Stone Bridge (left) and Chrysocolla Meditation that I shared Saturday. Get yours while supplies last! New StarsI've added over a dozen new Stars to the shop this week. Stars are one-of-a-kind fabrics and are all 1 yard cuts. There's a wide range of colors to choose from. These are just part of the new collection. Check them all out in the shop.
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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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March 2024
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