Monday, February 1, 2010

work in progress

I spent the weekend in a quilting class all about using photographs to create quilts.

The woman who taught the class is genius and so inspiring. I have a lot of work ahead of me to finish this quilt, but I'll be excited to share it with her when I get there.




The photo: a view up through the workings to the ceiling of a historic carousel outside of Washington DC. I took this photo on a class trip in college, some 11 or so years ago.

The quilt so far: a bunch of cut out and Wonder-Under-ed fabric pinned to tracing paper.



I've got to do some experimenting to get the background, the underside of the roof, looking right, so I concentrated on the layers above that one over the weekend. I'm liking where it's going even if it does look vaguely like Japanese propoganda art work.

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

I've been lazy about posting, though not with the sewing. Most of that comes from a neglect to take decent photos of projects, or photos during the course of sewing. I'll learn eventually.

Here is the Christmas present I made for my parents.



There are 282 pieces of fabric within the black border. The whole thing is about 2 feet wide.

It's a kit from England Designs, a technique she calls picture piecing. It was not difficult, in terms of technical ability, just time consuming and tedious. I love the finished result though!



Here's the back, pieced from leftovers and a fat quarter that was given to me for helping hold quilts during a guild meeting. It just happened to fit in perfectly.

The stitching is all in the ditch, and I mostly stayed in the ditch. It was good practice and fun. Very fun. I may like the actual quilting part of quilting more than I thought.


Ironically, on Christmas Eve, I was telling Dad about taking a class on making a quilt from a photo and he said it would be neat to do a West Texas landscape. I was very excited for my parents to open this and see my handy work. Mom actually immediately started figuring out where to hang it up, which says a lot because there is other artwork around the house that has never been hung after years of being gifted or purchased. All in all, a rather successful project.