Amazon Birds - Work In Progress

This is the project I am currently working on. It is a Fiber Art Wall Hanging of two Macaws. It is a Work In Progress at this point.  

Two Fishermen

This is the fiber art piece that I’ve been working on for the last few months. It is a depiction of my husband and one of his friends sitting stream side looking at a river. This photo is of the quilt top. My next step is basting and then machine quilting. Whenever I get to this stage it feels like “It’s all downhill from here!”.

I will post more once it’s finished. I hope you are making good use of your home confinement. Although I’m not happy about missing out on my normal life, I do appreciate being able to get through this project.

Thanks for visiting my blog!

Quilting and Details

    Here is the final piece!  I show some details below:

This is a fun memory piece for me of Shane in his younger days. Thanks for visiting my blog!

"No Hitter" - Progress Photos

  This is my most recent portrait piece and I'm calling it "No Hitter." It is based on a photo of my nephew Shane when he was in little league. Here is the photo that I have based it on:


This photo was taken by one of his parents.

I took the photo and traced a line drawing from it. I enlarged the line drawing and used that as my pattern.











My first step is to paint the exposed body parts. I use white cotton fabric for that. Here are some photos of the painting process:




It looks pretty ugly here, but it improves as you keep going.

Here is my palette:



After all the body parts are painted it is on to the clothing. I used a commercial fabric and enhanced it to give shadows and highlights. Here is a photo showing the shadows on the pants:
















I'll show more on this art quilt process in my next post. Thanks for visiting my blog!

Design Steps for an Art Quilt

  This is the inspiration photo for one of my recent art quilts. I am making a series of art quilts of people showing "attitude", and this photo grabbed my attention immediately. I love the posture that she has, the way her eyes look at the camera, and of course her wonderful sense of fashion. She is very sure of herself!

For this series I am doing some pieces in a portrait fashion, and others on a whole cloth where I paint the image and the background on one piece of fabric. Portrait pieces have the image mounted on a separate background. For this one, I decided a portrait style was more suitable.  My plan is to create the image of the girl separately and then place it on a background that serves as a frame for the image.

My first step is to make a line drawing of the girl. I traced over the photo and got the major shapes and lines. Then I enlarged it to a full size print out at my local FedEx Office. They have a large format printer in their self service area. I have become good friends with that printer and know how to get my enlargements done without waiting for someone to help me. What a time saver!!!

This image is about 2' x 3 '.




I use the enlarged drawing as a template for the parts of the piece. By parts I mean individual clothing pieces and body parts.  I used to cut out freezer paper templates for the various parts, but not any more. I simply place the enlarged drawing on my light pad, place the fabric over the drawing, and pencil in the outline of the part on the fabric. Then I cut out the piece and paint on it to modify as needed.

I trace the outline of the image on a piece of muslin too. I mount the various parts on the muslin as I complete them. Here is the muslin I used for this piece:



The muslin serves as a connector to keep all the parts together, and it helps to prevent the background colors from being seen through the image. I use a muslin that has a tea stained color, light brownish. That color is good at preventing background color from coming through, and it add a bit of warmth to the top colors.

I'll show the making of the clothing next. It was fun finding the crazy color combinations that she was wearing in the photo.


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Palm Canyon is Finished!

This series of blog posts describes the process I used to make the commissioned Palm Canyon art quilt shown below.  Today’s post describes the finishing of this art quilt. Prior steps are shown in my previous posts.

Finishing Palm Canyon

Well it's taken a while, but this is the final post for the making of this quilt. Whew!

Because this was a larger quilt (3 feet by 4 feet) with a lot of appliqué pieces, I did my quilting stitching as I went along. The quilting stitching served to hold down the appliqué pieces so they wouldn’t fall off or shift as I moved to the next area. I used a variety of stitches across the quilt. These photos show some of the stitching that I used, and some finishing touches like beads and french knots.

thread painting

French knots on trees

beading at bottom of waterfall

I stitched some animal shapes in the larger spaces in the subsurface, like lizards, rabbits, tortoises, etc. This photo shows a lizard I stitched into a beige fabric piece.

lizard stitched into beige fabric

After all the quilting was done I squared it up, and sewed on a binding to the edge.  Next came the naming of the quilt and making a label. I let the client choose the name, and she selected “Joyful Solitude” because that is the feeling she gets when riding her horse back in the canyon. What a nice thought! Here is the label I made for the quilt back.

My last steps were blocking and photographing.  I am pleased to say the client was very happy with it and has hired me to make another custom piece for her. She was a pleasure to work with and I look forward to another interesting fiber art project!

My next posts are going to be about tips and quilting favorites. Thanks for visiting my blog! 

Maps - El Camino Real

Quilts on the Wall is doing an exhibit called "Maps" for the Quilts Inc. Long Beach International Quilt Festival this year. That show will run August 2, 3 and 4 at the Long Beach Convention Center. I am co-curating the Maps exhibit for a second year. This is a juried exhibit with this years' jurors being Beth Smith and Karen Cunagin from Visions.

"Maps" is a wonderful display of art pieces. I hope you have a chance to see it. I was fortunate enough to have my piece juried in to the show. It is based on the El Camino Real road that runs though the California Missions. I will be talking about the techniques I used to make this piece in future posts. I show it below. I hope I see you at the show.

Delphinium - Machine Quilting

background quilting

 I have sandwiched the Delphinium quilt and have been doing the machine quilting stitching on it. On the background I chose to stitch around the embroidered flowers that were on the background and then stitch curling shapes and leaves in the other background areas.











pitcher and foreground stitching

On the foreground fabric I stitched around the ribbon appliques that were on the fabric. The pots were stitched to emphasize some of the 3 dimensional appearance or just to add something interesting to look at when you got close up to the piece.




flower centers stitched down


In the flower areas I stitched in just the flower centers with a thread that matched the color of the centers. I wanted to allow the petal area to puff out a bit so I did no stitching on the petals.

In this photo you can see the large flower area has stitching in the centers, but I have not stitched the flowers in the lower right yet. I think it makes a big difference in the appearance.




Thanks for visiting my blog and have a nice day!