Making "My Cup Ranneth All Over the Patio"

This is the first of several posts that I will use to describe how I made this fiber art piece for my Serendipity Exchange group. I have been trying to do a bird themed piece for each exchange for the last year, at least. I want to try to keep it going as long as I can think of ways to configure the theme to birds in some way. 

I have bird feeders hanging from my patio cover, and the finches and sparrows make a huge mess out there, with seed dropped all over the paving. The doves are the clean up crew and come in to collect the spilled seed. I love seeing my chubby, well fed doves and hearing their cooing sound when I wake up. So this art quilt is dedicated to them. 

Below you can see the photos I took of the doves on the patio. I made black and white copies of the photos and enlarged the birds to a few different sizes. I cut out the black and white birds and made some arrangements with them to determine my layout. 

Once I decided on the bird sizes I wanted, I traced the birds on tracing paper and cut the tracings out. This is the cup and saucer I used as my inspiration for the piece. I photographed it and cut out the cup from the black and white printed image.

After doing my tracings I worked on arranging the doves and cup in a 12" x 12" square, which is the size requirement for this Serendipity exchange. This is what I came up with:

.


My next post will be about starting the painting on the background fabric.

Thanks for visiting my blog!

Cup Runneth Over

I am a member of a Serendipity Exchange group, and our most recent theme was "My Cup Runneth Over". This is the piece I created for that exchange.

"My Cup Ranneth All Over the Patio", Eileen Wintemute

I have been doing a lot of smaller pieces based on birds lately, so I decided to use the doves that eat bird seed on my patio as my muse for this one. They eat the seed that falls from the hanging bird feeders, but I put it in the cup and had it overflowing from the it. I decided to call it "My Cup Ranneth All Over the Patio". I will be giving details of the making of this piece in the next couple of posts.

You can see the Serendipity exchange by clicking on the Serendipity link on this page, to the right.

Thanks for visiting my blog!

Delphinium Field At Mancuso Shows on East Coast

This is my "Mellow Yellow" art quilt that I made for the traveling exhibit entitled "Delphinium Field".

This exhibit will be at the following Mancuso QuiltFest shows:

Mid Atlantic Show
February 27 - March 2, 2014
Hampton, Virginia
Greater Chesapeake Bay/Williamsburg Area

Mid Atlantic Quilt Festival XXV

The Quiltfest of New Jersey X

March 6 - 9, 2014

Somerset, New Jersey

Quiltfest New Jersey X

If you're in the area try to check out the shows!

Thanks for visiting my blog!

Facing and Sleeve

I used a facing to finish the edge of this piece. You can see it stitched down and pinned here.

And here is the strip I chose for the sleeve. It is a piece of bias binding from a package. And once those are stitched I called it done! Yippee! Onto the next project!

Some Final Touches

My final touches for the top of this mini-quilt included couching some yarn to the front of the pitcher and adding a smattering of buttons. Here are some photos of that work.

I extended the yarn off of the vase and into the background. The yarn is supposed to be a twirling vine shape or something.

And here are some red, white and blue buttons from my button stash.

Leaves, Stems and Flag

I'm getting close to stitching all the parts of the bouquet down, but before I do that I need to stitch some stems on for the flower buds and flag stick. The stems and flag stick are strips of yarn couched to the background. For me couching is just using a zig-zag machine stitch over the strip of yarn. Here is the yarn I used.

The leaves for this piece are made by stitching batik fabric leaf shapes to a wool background. The wool background was then cut about 1/8" from the batik fabric. In some instances I did a wavy shape cut in the wool to make it a little more interesting. 

One of the leaves was given a bent shape in the middle before stitching it to the background.











The flag was made by appliqueing star fabric to a red and white striped fabric and then stitching it to the flag pole. I hand stitched the flowers and flag to the quilted background. The leaves were machine stitched down.

Ruched Flowers and Embellishments

This photos shows a close up of the bouquet in my July 4th Mini Quilt. The three large flower heads and three flower buds are made from ruched strips of fabric. This post shows how I did the ruching. Its pretty simple.

bouquet

I taught myself to ruch from on line information. I Googled "ruching" and found several good on line references. There are different approaches and I selected the method that uses strips of fabric to make the ruched design. There are other methods that involved cutting a circle out of fabric and gathering it. I haven't learned that yet. I like the ease of the strip method, and I find that I often have left over fabric strips from projects. This is a good use for those strips and it’s a quick take along hand project.

Here is a summary of the steps for ruching:

• Cut a strip of fabric about 2.5 inches in diameter. For smaller flowers or buds, use about an 18" length. If you want a larger flower, use a one yard length. The width of the fabric can vary, so if you have something close to 2.5 inches, go ahead and use it. 

• If you want the edges to be unfrayed, then iron the edges down about 1/4 inch as shown in this photo.  If you want the edges to be frayed, leave them as they are.

• Thread a needle with thread that matches the fabric. Knot the end.

• Bring the needle up from the backside of the fabric at one end of the strip.

• Stitch through the strip at a 45 degree angle using a running stitch. When you get to the edge of the strip make sure the needle goes through to the backside of the strip.

• Bring the needle and thread around to the front and stitch through in the other direction at a 45 degree angle. Once again make sure the thread comes out the backside of the strip when you get to the edge of that strip.

• Do a couple of "zig zags" and then pull the thread to gather up. Gather up as you go along so you don't have to put too much strain on the thread. You don't want it to break and have to start over.

 

• When the gathered piece is about a long as you want it to be, secure the gathers by taking some back stitches in the back and knot the thread. These are short bud pieces. If I wanted to make a large flower head I would have much longer gathered lengths. 

• Shape the gathered length in a circle or U shape or however you want. Then stitch it down by hand to the quilt top. I like to stitch it to the top after it is quilted because the layers add more support for this embellishment.

And there you have it, easy ruching!