Summer Solstice Design Wall

Today is the longest day of the year AND it's a full moon, which makes it as rare as a whole cloth quilt! It's the first time it's happened in 70 years. I'll be celebrating that we made it through another winter of life, and now its time to celebrate the power of light over darkness! Hey, I look for any opportunity to celebrate!

And here's another reason to celebrate...
on the design wall today are all the sample sandwiches from the machine quilting class I took at Quilt Canada last week (details are here). I'm just letting all that inspiration soak into my brain until I decide what to do with these. Maybe I'll join them in a quilt-as-you-go style to have as a reference for the future.
I hand painted these blocks the week before Quilt Canada, so that I would have something pretty to practice my quilting designs on instead of plain fabric.

I used my favourite Setacolor paints and had a great painting day. It was dry and hot outside so the fabric dried very quickly and I didn't get much effect with the salt. When the paints dried, I heat set them with a hot iron, cut them into 8" squares and I was ready for the class. So fun!
To see more design wall postings, hop over to Patchwork Times.

Painting and Paper piecing

I enjoy sewing the mystery blocks at Paper Panache and have made many of them over the years. These blocks combine two of my favorite activities - mystery quilting and paper piecing.  I have sewn the block that Linda currently has for sale on the Paper Panache home page which was a previous mystery block #38.

I have this guy up on my design wall and often think about sewing some cat blocks in the border, but just haven't gotten around to it.

(Hey... Linda has a free pattern to sew "a round tuit"  click here!!)

Anyway, it's too hot here to do much machine quilting these days, so I have been slowly working on the new mystery block #52. I had set a challenge for myself to use only fabrics I had hand painted.  (You can read about it here and see the colours I painted).

 I started piecing the blocks and quickly ran out of the light blue fabric  before I had sewn half of the pieces. 

So I got out the paints again and painted more blue. The problem is I never write anything down, so I had to figure out which blue it was, and how much water to add to get a matching colour, and then see if it was usable once it dried (paint always dries lighter). This was trickey and very unscientific, as is my usual style!

But I think I got enough blue yardage that is "close enough". 

Here you can see the parts I had finished piecing on the right, my instruction sheet with the colour chart, the scraps of the original leftover blue pieces, and the remaining pattern pieces to sew, all on top of the new blue fabric...what do you think....is it a close enough match?!?

Quick Quilting Diversion

I am still quilting every day on my DD and starting to feel a little excited about approaching the binding stage...almost to the end of the marathon! I used a variation of the design that I quilted on the 9 patch blocks (see the 9 patch here) in each of the 18 setting triangles and the 4 corner setting triangles. Each step of this quilting has been quite labour intensive and I needed an easy and fun project to break up this quilting, so I worked on a quick gift for a friend. 

I painted this fabric using the Setacolor paints, which I love but are getting harder to find to purchase. I used foam flowers on the right side and set it outside to sunprint while it dries. The gold highlights don't show up well in the photos, but I was very happy with how it turned out.

Then I sandwiched it with a piece of warm and natural batting and outlined stitched the 11  flowers, then did some swirly curly stitching. It was fun fun fun..just what the quilting Dr. ordered for 

a quilting "pick me up"! Here is how it looks on the back. Now I think I'll do a little beading and finish it up. 

Quilt Canada classes (cont'd)

My second class at Quilt Canada was fabric painting with Margie Davidson. This was my favorite class because it was pure play time! These are the paints that were in our class kits - 4 transparent paints and 1 opaque...all Setacolor paints.
They are my preferred kind of fabric paints so far, because I like the hand of the fabric once they are dry and because of their sunprint abilities. This was my first experience with the opaque Setacolor and I didn't like it, because the hand of the fabric (almost stiff and crunchy) ends up to be similar to the Color Vie paints, which produces a fabric that is too thick/hard for the kind of intense beading I sometimes like to do. But I can see a limited use for the opaque paint for special effects, especially in a gold or copper colour.
Here is Margie on the right teaching us about wet vs. dry painting and how to scrunch paintings for special drying effects. Margie was a great teacher - organized, enthusiastic, an expert in her subject, and her handouts were the best of any class I have ever taken - clear, creatively organized and space for the students to write down their own comments as they learn. She also gave me lots of painting ideas that I hope to try out with the kids over the summer.
Here are the first class paintings on the drying rack. These were later overpainted and used for experiments in sunprinting. The Setacolor paints have this unique ability to produce silhouettes, even without the sun. On the right is one of my favorite sunprinted fabrics from this class...made using maple leaves, a small piece of plastic canvas, and a large piece of rubber shelf liner.
Stop by tomorrow to read about my class with Valerie Hearder.

Day at Reichards

What a fun day today! I taught a beginner's fabric painting class last month at Reichards and today the students brought back their work and started to do some quilting. Here are some of their favorite paintings. Next month we will work on embellishing. This has been my favorite class to teach for a few years now, since I still really love fabric painting.

And while I was at Reichards I signed up for a new BOM called "Be Attitudes". I haven't done many BOM quilts, but I know that this will be the perfect gift for a special someone...whenever I can possibly get it finished! You can see a photo of the quilt here. It will also give me a chance to practise some of the fancy stitches on my Janome Jem Platinum sewing machine.

Fabric Painting Class

Last month I taught a fabric painting class and today the students returned with their paintings - dried, heat set, and ready to quilt. They did a fantastic job learning how to work with the Setacolor paints and over the past month they have experimented with the techniques. Today we spent the first part of the class looking at the paintings, soaking up the creativity and learning new ideas from their work.
The painting on the left was made by Cathy. The class decided that it looked like a Monet painting. She is thinking about making it into a water scene. It was heavily salted when wet, which gives it the mottled texture.
The painting to the right was made by another Kathy in the class. She made some beautiful sun prints using leaves and this one has great movement. We were amazed that she found a day over the past month which had both sunlight and no wind!!
Ruth created this blue painting (on the left) using water softener salt. I haven't used this kind of salt before and she got some great effects with it. Does anyone else see a tree that wants to be quilted in this painting? Ruth also made some creative sunprints using coins and jewelry!

The painting on the right was made by Danielle. This photo is deceiving because it is actually a large painting, with brighter colours than you see on the screen...I'm still learning how to use this camera properly! I'll try to get a better photo next class.

The painting on the left was made by Gerry and it is also a sun print, using leaves from her yard. She told us that many of the leaves blew away and had to be repositioned, but it
turned out great!

This painting on the right was made by Geraldine and she spent lots of time overpainting some of her pieces. This piece has several unique treatments in drying and painting.

This piece on the left was made by Sheila, who has experience with fabric dyeing and she tried some interesting techniques to make this landscape, including the use of Saran Wrap, and shaving cream!

As you can see the students are very creative and each are developing their own style. Next month we will meet again to further work on turning their paintings into quilts.