Tag Archives: thread painting

A Cardinal for a Cause

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As a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan, it pains me to say this, but Congratulations to the St. Louis Cardinals on winning the World Series.  Although the cardinal on my quilt looks a bit like the ones on the St. Louis uniforms, it was inspired by the cardinals that visit the bird feeder outside our kitchen window.

I made Winter Cardinal (9 inches by 12 inches) as a donation to the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative.  Both of my parents suffered from Alzheimer’s, so supporting the search for a cure is very important to me. Continue reading →

My Cone Flower Quilt is in the May Auction for AAQI

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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

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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.

More AAQI Quilts

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I finished the last 3 of my recent batch of small quilts for the AAQI. These each started as photo that I took and then played with in Photoshop before printing on fabric.  I finished each of these using the stabilizer ‘frame’ that I described in this post.  There’s a size limit of 9 by 12 inches on the AAQI quilts, otherwise I’d have made the frames a bit wider for each of these quilts.

Pink Daisy was actually a plain white daisy in my back yard, but the magic of Photoshop let me change the color.  I had fun playing with different free-motion quilting patterns on each of the petals.

I took this photo of Delicate Arch at about 6 a.m. on a blazingly hot summer day at Arches National Park.  The sunrise was beautiful and it even made it worth getting up at 4:30 and hiking 1.5 miles uphill to reach this spot.

Purple Orchid is from a photo of an orchid that I bought at Home Depot for about $10 several years ago.  It bloomed spectacularly for quite a while, but it’s been dormant for a couple years now.  Guess it might be permanently dormant at this point.

The splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not rob the little violet of its scent nor the daisy of its simple charm.  If every flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness. 

Therese of Lisieux

There are several ways of looking at Delicate Arch. Depending on your preconceptions you may see the eroded remnant of a sandstone fin, a giant engagement ring cemented in rock, a bow-legged pair of petrified cowboy chaps, a triumphal arch for a procession of angels, an illogical geologic freak, a happening—a something that happened and will never happen quite that way again, a frame more significant than its picture, a simple monolith eaten away by weather and time and soon to disintegrate into a chaos of falling rock.

Edward Abbey


Fireworks

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After my parents died, I put off sorting through all their old photos that were in boxes in my basement.  Last year I finally went through the boxes  and found some amazing things that I didn’t expect, including a couple journals that my mother kept when she was a girl.  Here are two pages from her 1937 journal, written when she was 14 years old (I’ve included a typed transcript below each entry since I could never read my mother’s handwriting).

Sunday, July 4, 1937 (185th Day—180 Days to Follow)
Independence Day
Shot fireworks all day long. Had one swell time.  Following were at picnic at lake: momma, daddy, Esther, Carl, Lill S, Gladys, Alvin, Lilly H, Dolores, Aunts Lue, Lena, Anna, Minnie’s M. and W., Uncles Otto and Fred, Aunt Carie of Libertyville,  Walter, Laura Hinty and Dick, Willard and Armela also.  Laura and Dickee are staying over till tomorrow.  When it was dark we shot off a lot of fireworks which we had a lot of.  Got ice cream after all was done.

Monday, July 5, 1937 (186th Day—179 Days to Follow)
Laura went home today but Dick is going to stay till  Saturday.  After supper went to Crystal Lake to see the fireworks display. There also was a carnival there.  Dick, Dolores, and I went on a lot of rides at the carnival.  The fireworks were swell. Everyone says they were the best they had ever seen. For the finale there were 50 rockets in air at once. Got to bed at 1:00 o’clock A.M.

These journal entries were the inspiration for my latest donation quilt for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative — Fireworks.

I had fun playing with metallic threads to try to capture the sparkle of fireworks.  I haven’t used metallic threads very much, and I learned a few things with this quilt.  I used two different types of thread–a flat glitter hologram thread (such as the gold on the right side), and a metallic thread (such as the blue on the right).  Both of these threads are from Superior Threads.  Superior recommends using a size 90 topstitch needle for both threads, but I found that a smaller size 80 topstitch needle worked best for the flat glitter thread, and a larger size 100 topstitch worked best for the metallic thread.  I had no trouble quilting with the metallic thread, but I found that the flat glitter thread behaved much better when not stitching over other threads.  I ran into a lot of thread breakage when I tried to stitch the flat glitter thread over the metallic thread.  When using these types of specialty threads, I found that a bit of patience and experimentation leads to better results.

You can look up at the stars and every night they’re going to be in the same place, but you can launch a six inch shell and you don’t really know what it’s going to look like until it actually performs.
James Sousa

Fireworks are an art form that uses the night sky as the canvas.
Larry Crump



Winter Cardinal Quilt

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I recently completed this small quilt–it’s about 9 inches by 12 inches.  It is a donation quilt for AAQI (as soon as I get around to sending it in).  We have a bird feeder right outside our kitchen window, and at this time of year, the cardinals that come to visit are one of the few bright spots in the yard.  Often we’ll see several male and female cardinals sitting in the pine tree, waiting for their turn at the feeder.

The quilt is made from a single piece of hand-dyed fabric with a piece of rust-dyed cotton/silk for the branch, and then lots of thread.