Spring: it's coming again

Actually it came and went.  I wrote this post last April and just finished it.

Okay -- maybe not here in Wisconsin.  But for most of the northern hemisphere, it is.  My guild, Lodi Valley Quilters Guild, has a spring challenge each year that coincides with Quilt Academy.  A choice of three classes are offered from a long list of possibilities; it's a really big deal.  I'm on the committee (I redesigned the brochure this year) so I felt more than obligated to finish my challenge for the quilt display we did with it.

The challenge fabric was this floral.  

 Totally not my style.  But I had to use some of it.  On the front.  Hmmm...

So I got this idea of spring animals frolicking in the flowers. I ironed fusible web to the entire fat quarter.  Then I sat at a meeting and later in front of the TV and cut out individual flowers.  I made it easy on myself and used textile glue to fasten the sheep parts to the background for quilting.

I pinned a thin cotton batt to the back and stitched all the lambs' wool with Aurifil thread.  Here are the finished lambs before I cut away the batting and layered it with the final wool batting.


I will post a photo of the finished piece in a week or two after the show on April 5.  I might have some fun photos of the guild members then too.

Okay, this is not true.  I will post the finished project sometime this month.  OK.  I lied again.  It has been nearly a year and here it is!

Structure: How I did it

My list of things to do has long included seeing the colorful row houses that one sees in Europe.    So for this challenge, I took the structure thing a bit literally and drew a row of fantasy buildings.  This was a piece of washed cotton that I ironed to a bit of freezer paper to stabilize it for the drawing.  

After I finished the drawing, I layered it with a wool batt and stabilizer on the back.  Then I stitched over it with my machine using white and dark grey cotton threads.

Then I rinsed it to get rid of the blue pen.  After it dried, I ironed it to flatten it.  

I used Derwent Inktense pencils to color in the buildings.  Those scissors were handy for snipping threads.  

 I used these three different textile mediums.  Why?  Because I felt like it.





This is a bit of a close up of the penciled piece before I used the mediums on it.

 The bright green building on the left and the partial one to the left of that have medium on them.  After I finished the penciling I brushed on the diluted medium.  I haven't done this in a while and forgot how much it spreads.

And a much better photograph of the finished piece.  Actually, it's not finished. I think it needs more quilting.   I'll post again after I quilt the sky.

Structure Challenge

"A Row by Any Other Name"

I created this for the "Structure Challenge" at Art Quilts Around the World.  Hopefully, I will get it together in the next few days and put together a couple of posts detailing how I did it.