Back to School = Back to Reality

If you are like me and still have kids in school, or if not,  imagine a summer filled with playing, sunshine and happiness.   Then imagine a dark cloud moving in called 'School' and life is filled with tears, lunches and  homework. Maybe I am exaggerating slightly alot, but regardless the days of no schedule are over for ten months.

On the positive side, and there always is one, I can GET BACK TO QUILTING!  You have been so great to stick by me, as I know my posts border on sparse this past summer.  Now I am ready to roll out the quilts, find new ways to 3D embellish and maybe even do a bit of teaching along the way.

This weekend I spent time working on two different quilts.   One was hand applique... OH MY GOODNESS that is tedious work.  If you are a hand quilter, you really, really need to give yourself a pat on the back.  Heck, go buy yourself something chocolate.  You deserve it.

The other project, albeit hand work, but not quite so insane, was stitching my felted pieces.   Finally this weekend I had a brainwave and figured out how I was going to turn this into a quilt.  It took the right piece of fabric and two years of sketches, yes I did say two years.   I could just never get the design to look like what I wanted it to.

I even visioned using it in a piece of wearable art... but the thought of sewing them together and then cutting off the pieces that didn't fit into the pattern made me too sad.

Now I am really excited with what I think may work.   We all know what you have on paper does not necessarily turn out like that once you try and make it into a quilt.  Well, that is what happens with me.  How do you get a new quilt started?

Felting Series Update

I thought I would show you how far along I am in my felting series. There is a range of colours both in the roving and in the embroidery thread. Each one is heavily stitched.

More Felting

First let me welcome stubbornishZACK to my blog. Thank you for joining and hope you enjoy the ride!

I have been continuing on my felting series and have 2 more to add. I am tossing about turning them into an article of clothing, quilted of course. But for now, I continue to work on each piece. I am currently embroidering an orange one.

Tonight I took a little break from felting and pulled out my new sculpey pack. I found a great tute on youtube on making beads and gave it a try. I will post those near the end of the week. I was pleasantly surprised how well it turned out.

More Feltwork

I seem to need a break from quilting, I think it's a summer thing. I find myself wanting to try new techniques.

Therefore I decided to explore all the things I want to try but don't.

I made a list of them:

1. polymer clay beads
2. felting
3. paper and fabric beads
4. using a bleach pen on my hand dyed fabric

This is what I am going to do this summer, give this list a whirl. I will see if I like them and can use them in my art quilts.

The last few posts, have been my experimentation with felting. I have included my 2 newest pieces here. I followed Janeville's tutorial to get started.

At the moment, Houston TX and I are not getting along.

I wonder why someone can hire a personal trainer to get into shape, but not hire a personal quilt consultant to get into shows?

Felted and Threadwork

I follow this fabulous blog by Laura Wasilowski and she posts embroidery stitches every Thursday. You can check out her blog here.

I decided to practice some of the stitches that I would like to use in my art quilts. I made these 2 pieces in the past week. You can see the previous post where it was just felted and now the threadwork is done on both.

It looks like I am starting my first series of felted pieces. My first series for that matter!