Christmas Quilts - Part 6

I got the first part of the trapunto completed on the bird border and all the excess batting has been trimmed. I finished making the backing for the two Christmas quilts. The first one with the pine cone rows will be used with the cardinal border quilt. The second one with the poinsettia rows will be used with the other quilt. The red fabrics are different. The one with the pine cones is Robert Kaufman's Fusion 5573 in Lipstick while the other red is the red fabric that was part of the border fabric on the second quilt. That border ran along each selvage and the red was the remainder of the fabric.

So this week I'll be making the quilt sandwiches and will be starting on the stitch in the ditch.

Christmas Quilts - Part 5

I got the borders on the second Christmas lap quilt. I wasn't too certain how this was going to look because I didn't really like the border print when it arrived. It seemed a bit on the dull side. Interestingly enough once it was sewn on and I got the quilt up on my design wall it actually looks quilt nice. It has a completely different look and feel from the one with the cardinal border which I have included below this one for comparison. So I like both of them, for different reasons.

So now I have to get my snowflake designs figured out for the quilting in the main blocks. I'm still not sure what I'm going to quilt in the 4 patch blocks nor the border of the second quilt. Also before I actually do any quilting I will stitch in the ditch to stabilize the quilt since many of the pieces have bias cuts.

Tips and Tricks - Modified Trapunto

I finally finished the test on the modified Trapunto and I have to say I'm pleased with the results and I'm going to use this technique for the birds in the border print. For those who are interested I've taken pictures of the steps I did in making the modified Trapunto birds and will provide an explanation underneath each photo. Note you can click on each photo for a larger version.

Here you take a piece of batting and place it underneath the birds (or what ever you want to create the Trapunto effect on) and free motion stitch the outline of the birds sewing together the fabric and batting. I initially using a fine bobbin weight tread on top so it wouldn't show too much and a regular cotton thread on the bottom. The second time I did this I used an invisible thread, YLI's Wonder Invisible thread in smoke colour on top for this colour of fabric.

Here is what it looks like on the back. I pulled the top thread to the back, tied them off and trimmed them.

Next you need a good pair of embroidery scissors and you trim away the batting close to your stitching lines.

This is what it will look like when you have finished trimming. You will have to be careful when trimming that you don't cut your quilt top. It's probably best to lay the fabric on a table top and trim away the batting that way so to quilt top doesn't get in the way of the scissors.

Then you cut another piece of batting to fit the whole piece of fabric and your backing fabric, make the sandwich and then free motion quilt around the birds. Here I used a Sulky rayon is a dark red and a Superior thread Bottom Line bobbin thread in dark red for the bobbin on the cardinal, but when I first did the chickadee I still had basic cotton thread in the bobbin. On the cardinal I quilted the wing with too much detail so my next trial is to only do the outline like I did with the chickadee.

Here is what the back looks like.

Here's the details of the chickadee.

This is the second trial where I only did the outline of the cardinal's wing.

I did a third on on a light coloured fabric so that you could better see the Trapunto effect because I couldn't get a good picture to show you that it really does work. So I would say it's a success and now to start cutting pieces of batting for all my birds.

Christmas Quilts - Part 4

I finally got the border sewn on the Christmas quilt. It took much longer than I expected because of the type of border fabric I selected. It is a directional print that had a small gold border on the left hand side and a small red border with gold filigree on the right hand side. So I had to make the cardinals go around the quilt instead of having them be upright on both the right and left hand borders. With the birds going around the quilt the right hand side is the only one where the birds are upright.

In addition I barely bought enough fabric so instead of cutting all my borders to size, I just cut out the borders from the full length of the fabric and started working with them that way. The fabric had 3 rows of the cardinals, and then there were 2 rows of pine cones and 2 rows of poinsettias. Parts of those may end up being used for the back. So the two sides and the top were sewn from the full lengths of the fabric. Then the left over pieces were pieced together to make the bottom border. Amazingly I lucked out and was able to piece it in such a way that the flow of the birds was in tact.

After everything was put together the picture below is all that was left of the cardinal borders. Hardly any waste what so ever, or what a close call.

I was trying to figure out if there was a way to miter the corners so that I didn't end up with half birds, but I think the only way that could happen is if the inner quilt is sized specifically to the border and the placement of the birds or what ever other image you might have. The upper right hand corner is the only one where I succeeded in not having a part bird.

While I was working on this border an idea came to me for the quilting. I'm going to do some experiments with a modified trapunto technique that I saw and if it works I just might go for it. I'll keep you posted on the experiment and whether it works or not.

Christmas Quilts - Part 3

I was playing with the layout the blocks for the Christmas lap quilt on Tuesday and thought I had it. So I took a picture of if yesterday evening so I could make a post here and when I looked at the picture I realized that I didn't have the red and cream coloured 4 patch blocks right. Can you see what's wrong with the placement of them in this picture? (click on it for a larger version)

Did you figure it out. Well all the red blocks with gold metallic are on the left hand side of the 4 patch placement and all the non metallic red blocks are on the right hand side of the 4 patch block placement. They should have been placed so that they were alternating as in the picture below.

I've had this happen to me a couple of times when I've looked at the design wall and thought everything was good only to take a picture, look at it and see that something wasn't quite right with the placement of my blocks. I'm really glad that I take pictures of all my quilts in various stages of completeness and study them to see how things look before I start sewing. Last thing I want to be doing is sitting down to an evening with the seam ripper.

Kaffe Fassett - Part 2

Yesterday was the Kaffe Fassett workshop at the Creative Festival and this is what I have to show for my 6 hours.

By no means do I have a finished top ready to sew and I still have to add a couple more rows to this quilt before I will have the size that I need. I was going through my stash of fabrics today and I think I may have found a couple of things that will work. I didn't have time to cut the half triangles so that very outer border fabric I just pinned so that you could see what it would look like. The column of diamonds that are next to it will all the way around the whole quilt as the diamond border followed by the striped fabric.

So the scoop on this workshop is if I had the magic crystal ball and could see what would transpire in the 6 hours I would not pay the $150 plus purchase the book and over 20 different fabrics.

I'm not sure where Kaffe is coming from, but he isn't a teacher. There was no discussion about how he develops his quilts, his use of colour, what works, what doesn't and there were no handouts. We were just let loose with our fabrics and told to put something together. He would come by every now and then and just say that something was either too light, too dark, the wrong size of print, or just didn't work and would go on to someone else. His assistant Brandon Malby was much more helpful in that he would at least show you some options of what might work in place of the things that Kaffe said didn't work. Eventually people got the idea of what didn't work because the same things would keep coming up and up. But there never really was a sense of what works and why it works.

Over the course of the 6 hours there were certain things that I picked up after hearing/seeing about either my quilt and/or other people’s quilts and they are:

- Stick either with lights, mid-tones or darks within the colour palette that you have selected, but don’t mix all of them together. Many of us ended up discarding our lightest fabrics.
- Even though we were using bold prints, you have to make sure that there is still enough variation between the types of bold prints. They shouldn't all look the same both from the type of print and the various colours/shades in each the fabric.
- When you pick your colour palette, you still need some other colour(s) at various points to give the design some punch. There were a couple of brown toned quilts that he made the people put some red fabrics into the mix, and one gal’s red quilt got a print that had red with lime green in it for punch. What ever your punch colour is, it also has to be a mid-tone if you are using mid-tones, dark if dark, or light if light.
- Be careful of the border fabrics so that they compliment the quilt and don’t look like a frame around the quilt
- Also when you have picked your colour palette make sure that all the fabrics are not “matchy matchy” to each other. So if you picked green, you have emerald green, and jade green and moss green and grass green etc. and that the prints do have other colours to add some interest.

For the last hour he did go around and critique all the quilt designs and it seemed that he liked what come out of every one's process. But again there didn't seem to be a lot of knowledge passed on as to why things worked, more like this goes well with that. But was it the colour of one fabric with the design of another, the intensity of the colours, the addition of other colours, a lot was just not very effectively communicated.

This will be packed away for the time being since I have several projects that are currently on the go and need to be finished up before the end of the year. I will resurrect this one sometime in the new year.

Creative Festival - Maggie Vanderweit Workshop

Today I was at the Creative Festival for a workshop with Maggie Vanderweit called Painting with Threads. Below is my one and only piece that I was able to make in a 6 hour workshop. I really like the way it turned out. This particular piece is using a dissolvable stabilizer. I used Solvy, placing a layer of decorative yarns, ribbon, organza, etc. between sheets of the stabilizer and then hooping it and then free motion stitching it. I used a Sulky holographic thread in copper on the outer edge followed by various rayon threads and then finished it with the copper thread in the middle. Once you are done stitching the piece, you wash out the stabilizer and this is the finished result. I'm not sure what the next step will be for this piece, but I really like the end result.

Now you may wonder, did this really take me 6 hours to make. No, this piece took just over 2 hours to do. So what happened with the rest of the time. Maggie did a bit of talking and some demos throughout the 6 hours but unfortunately over half the class was having technically issues with the sewing machines that were provided by Pfaff including me. I wasted over 2 hours trying to sort through some nasty tension issues and this was with a brand new computerized machine. And if the machine wasn't having tension problems then it was breaking needles and thread at an alarming rate. There was a lot of frustration in the room, and several folks left a couple of hours before the end of the class.

This was my first time ever taking a class at the Creative Festival, and one of the selling features was not having to lug your sewing machine along with all your other supplies. Well this proved to be anything but a plus. I still have the Kaffe Fassett Workshop on Saturday but I have a funny feeling that this will be the first and last time that I will be taking anything at the Creative Festival. I will give you my final take on the festival after Saturday's workshop.