I’ve completed my latest quilt Urban Sunset. In this earlier post I talked about creating the quilt top, and all that was left was adding the quilting.
Here’s the completed top.
Tag Archives: Quilting
Watercolor Coneflowers
Watercolor Coneflowers is my quilt for the Fall 2012 Blogger’s Quilt Festival. It’s a small art quilt that I’ve been working on to donate to the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative (which has already raised over $773,000 to raise awareness of Alzheimer’s and fund research). Both of my parents suffered from Alzheimer’s, and you can read more about why I support AAQI here. Continue reading
Two In-Progress Quilts
I have two quilts that I’ve been working on for a while. The tops for both are complete, and I’ve made good progress quilting one of them. There are a lot of similarities between these quilts–both use fabric that I designed digitally in Photoshop and Illustrator and that I had printed at Spoonflower.com; both combine those fabrics with my hand-dyed fabrics; and both use a circle motif.
Over the next posts, I’ll detail the process I went through in creating these quilts along with the techniques I used to put them together. Continue reading
Kauai Turtles Quilt
I previously wrote about a Hawaiian Cheater Quilt design that I did for a contest at Spoonflower. I ordered a yard of the fabric on which I included a large version of the design and three small versions (about 8 inches by 10 inches) in different colors. Here are the smaller versions.
Creating a Quilt, Part 3 — Constructing the Quilt
In two earlier posts I talked about my process for creating a quilt design starting from a photo. In this post, I’ll go through the process of actually making the quilt based on the final design (shown here). 
With the strong circular element in the design, I knew it would be important for the grass shapes to line up exactly across the circle. Normally I prefer to make my quilts by piecing rather than some form of applique. I’ll often use Ruth McDowell’s piecing technique on a complex quilt. However, for this design, I thought that piecing would take forever and I wanted to complete the quilt fairly quickly since it was part of a class (“Inspired to Design” with Elizabeth Barton at Quilt University). Continue reading
Creating a Quilt, Part 2 — Finalizing the Design
In my previous post, I walked through the initial design process I used to create the quilt Prairie Grasses. 
I started with this photo, drew sketches to simplify the design and started on looking at value studies.
My first two value studies, shown below, were of the original sketch. I liked each of these, but I thought it would be more interesting to combine them in some way.
Creating a Quilt, Part 1 — From Photo to Sketch
I recently completed the class “Inspired to Design” with Elizabeth Barton through Quilt University. The class is about the process of creating art quilts, starting with an idea, working up sketches, using value studies, creating color schemes and finally constructing the quilt.
I really enjoyed the class and I completed a quilt based on one of the designs I worked on. In this post and the next two I’ll walk through my steps in creating this quilt. Continue reading
Lin-Z’s First Quilt
My young friend Lin-Z had never made a quilt. She’d never used a sewing machine or an iron. But she likes doing art projects, so a quilt seemed like a perfect project while she and her family were visiting us for a week.
Lin-Z likes butterflies and monkeys, and she chose a monkey as the subject of her quilt. 
She started by drawing the monkey on a piece of freezer paper (here’s the first draft). Then she labeled and cut out all the pieces. Continue reading
My Cone Flower Quilt is in the May Auction for AAQI
One of my small quilts, Cone Flower, is part of this month’s quilt auction benefiting the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative. This non-profit, all volunteer group has raised over $520,000 for Alzheimer’s research since 2006.
Below are some of the other quilts. You can see all the quilts up for auction (and place your bids) here.
Here’s Cone Flower, my quilt in the auction:
You can see a short video of the new traveling exhibit Alzheimer’s Illustrated: From Heartbreak to Hope here.
New Quilt — Coneflowers
I thought I’d try to make a small quilt with sort of a ‘watercolor’ feel. I started with these photos of coneflowers from my back yard.
After a lot of playing in Photoshop, I reduced the photos to this black and white ‘sketch’ — if I could only draw, this would have been done a lot faster.
I printed this on some cotton fabric and backed it with some stabilizer and then I experimented with different thread options for the leaves.
Even with stabilizer, and using a hoop while thread painting, the fabric was bunching up a bit. Also, the white fabric showing through the thread wasn’t giving me the look I was after, so back to Photoshop. I painted the sketch with multiple transparent layers to get a watercolor look.
Here’s the result after printing on fabric.
Before starting with the thread, I backed this with an ultra-firm stabilizer (peltex #72) and a backing layer of fabric. I started the thread painting on the stems, and kept it fairly light, but when I got to the leaves, the thread started building up pretty heavily.
At this point I knew the ‘watercolor’ idea was long gone, but I was liking the heavy thread work, and at least a tiny bit of the fabric color was showing through.
Here’s the finished quilt, Coneflowers. It’s 17 inches wide by 25 inches long.
And here’s a detail view.
I really like how it turned out, though it’s nothing like I intended. I think I might go back to the black and white sketch and try another version, but with much less thread work.
In honor of National Poetry Month, I wrote this haiku after working for hours on this thread painting:
Coloring with thread
Quilting or Embroidery?
Love all the texture.
Color On Cloth 