WILD Flowers completed!

     In an earlier blog I gave a tutorial on making these wild flowers. I have now completed this piece and am madly making tons more flowers, as there seems to be more demands for it! Yeah!
     I am working on more of the wild variety, but have also started a silver gray color scheme, and a naturalistic yellows/browns theme to mimic sunflowers.
An important follow up I am going to add to the tutorial is the 'learned the difficult way' information regarding the background. Choose your background colors and size, piece, quilt and bind it, THEN place your flowers, stems and leaves onto it. I used masking tape to hold all the fluff and stuff aside while I struggled to quilt, which made it doable, but still difficult!
I will post a picture soon of the sunflower or gray theme, as I have come up with a further embellishment-little flower as center of big flower. Way cool!

Experimenting

I have been keenly interested in the felting/embellishing field day going on throughout the quilt art world. I drove a friend's felting machine for just a moment, but it was enough to help me decide I want to do the slow, old fashioned way of felting/embellishing, by hand. I want to be able to arrange and poke and arrange and poke, adjust, add, stab it some more...this is the result of my first attempt. Nothing to send home to Mom, but it is as fun as I thought it might be to do! I plan to take classes while in the UK, and come back a pro. :?}

Spring Green REALLY done...

Spring Green, when you last saw it, had an inefficient stick stuck through the hanging sleeve. The new owner requested that the 'soft' wall hanging be made into a 'hard' one. I achieved that by extending the mountains into the borders and mounting the entire piece on foam core, covering the raw edges on the back with a large piece of spring greens batik. I like this so much better! It truly looks complete now...

Last Vestige

 

 This was started during my very fun, creative, restive Art Camp week. Just finished it yesterday. I had to be in the proper mood to make design decisions...I loved creating the quilting; free motion/no pattern/leafy leafy. The gold background is one of my hand dyes, the tree is of commercial fabric. The leaves are the ones I tutorialed on this blog. I cropped the photo too closely to show, but there is traditional French binding around the perimeter, except in the root area of the tree. I left that 'raw'.

Contemporary Geometrics

"What Box?"

 I don't do geometrics! Well...at least I didn't before this past few months. Batiks and hand dyes = impactful wall art.

Green Leaves

Rust Leaves

WILD Flowers 101

WILD Flowers tutorial-another free motion embroidery play!

Pick your palette. Light, medium, dark works well. Any kind of thread. Variegated is fun to use on the 'bubble quilting'!

Choose your shape(s). Sturdy cardboard (cereal boxes, cardboard that comes in stacks of scrap booking paper, packaging-my rectangle shape below came from the box my surge protector came in) or strong paper plates. I cut one paper plate circle, then re-sized and stitched it back together to get the egg shape. Flatten the ends for easier wrapping! Circles are difficult to wrap-the thread wants to slip and slide. Place double sided tape around the perimeter to help tame it. Don't try for precision wrapping on circles, unless you want the huge hump of crossed threads in the center of your flower. Slightly sloppy disperses the threads and is easier to 'nail down' in the 'quilting' stage. Squares and rectangles are the easiest shapes to wrap, so they are a good shape to start with for practice.
The larger the window, the larger the finished shape. The wider the border, the wider the finished fringe. (you can always trim it down shorter when finished)

First wrap, North to South. I usually choose the darkest thread.

Second wrap, East to West, same dark thread.

Repeat the wrapping process with the second color, North-South, East-West. (I usually choose the lightest shade) The more you wrap, the thicker the fringe and shape. Wrap to taste, or as long as your patience holds! :?}

*Be sure and set your machine up for free motion embroidery. Feed dogs down, less tension, less pressure foot, hopping/embroidery foot.

Begin by sewing a straight stitch around the window's perimeter to initially secure the threads. I have now changed to the third thread, 'star of the show'. If you struggle with threads tangling in the hopper foot, just place a piece of clear 'Solvy' on top of the thread to keep your foot free to move and not tangle up.

Begin the decorative stitching in the window. I like to use 'bubbles', but there are no rules, just the need to 'link' all the threads together to make 'whole cloth' when released from the cardboard frame.

Bubbles completed.

Time to snip all the threads free from the frame, releasing the fringe.

Fringe released, piece complete. Begin again-it's addictive!

WILD Flowers-work in progress. I am creating the stems by wrapping various fabrics around cotton rope. I free motion embroidered the leaves in all kinds of colors and variegated threads. I am auditioning borders. PLAY! IMPORTANT UPDATE
Choose your background colors and size, piece, quilt and bind it, THEN place your flowers, stems and leaves onto it. So much easier than trying to work around all that fluffy stuff, stems and leaves! :?}

Iris completed

La Couleur Pourpre is complete, made its debut at the Chelan Art Show. I have finished some other things as well, but just haven't been home to photograph and download. I will try and do so this coming week.

Morning Glory aka...

Exuberance!

Now that I have used the skill saw to cut a thin piece of plywood to size, put a layer of batting on the front of that plywood, glued and stapled blue, then green, hand-dyed fabric on top of that, then placed the quilt, then applied some more flowers in the border with a grand finale' of a few hand stitched stems, Husband has changed his mind about the 'Elvis velvet painting'.  He now proclaims, "That'll sell!"   :?}

Detail

Now what?

Morning Glory quilted...but now what?

 I quilted and quilted this piece, "go with the flow" style, so it is a very busy sky. I used some variegated threads. It all just disappears from a distance, which is good! The foreground flowers are supposed to be the stars of the show...

detail

The quilting 'saved' this piece as far as my husband is concerned. He voices his opinion of my work when I ask him to. Morning Glory got the harshest verdict yet-velvet Elvis painting! But now he says it is okay... :?}  My current dilemma is, how am I going to 'frame' it after I bind the edges?  It is 42" wide!

Auditioning Twigs

This twig does not 'do it'! I may have to 'string it up'! (sold)

 What did I ever do before pc's and digital instant gratification? My design wall is a great help in designing and finalizing my work, but I need that one step further away that pix from the camera give me.

This twig works...but it needs some bling dangling on the left!