Beading and Other Stuff

I showed you the start of this beading project, but never showed you the final product. Once I started beading, it went fairly quickly. Much faster than embroidery, in my opinion.

And some close-ups:

I finished piecing together that giant quilt, made a sandwich, and quilted around each smaller block to stabilize it. And then I pondered hand quilting it. In the meantime, I was sitting in church, and wrote in my journal, “my next big quilt must be about PEACE.” And later in the week I realized that I could make THIS BIG QUILT about peace. So I marked out huge letters “PEACE” on it, and know that I’ll hand stitch those. And then I chose 12 excellent verses on Peace, and marked 12 spots on the quilt where these will be hand stitched. But in the meantime, because it is so huge and heavy, I think that I will machine  quilt it. That way it might actually be finished in this time period where we all need to think about peace and what it means for each of us.

I’ve also started back to work on my series “Characteristics of God.” I’m hand stitching the words and then machine quilting each piece. Still pondering how to finish the edges. There are only 10 pieces in this series, so I am hopeful to complete them soon.

And in the meantime, my fascination with hexies has not diminished. They are fun to make, and relatively mindless at this stage. Just right for evenings sitting by the fire with two dogs on my lap and watching my TV shows.

Finally, I’m Beading!

Finally. I did what I knew I needed to do in order to start beading. I needed a designated place to put all my beading materials and be able to keep it out for a while. My cutting table/desk is perfect. I knew I was at a good stopping place (not making any new quilts or quilt sandwiches for a bit) and so I set up my beading station.

After adding a few beads to the last quilt I showed you, I knew I wanted to work on a quilt that was more about the beading than the embroidery. I had “finished” this quilt a while ago. But while I actually had planned to do beading and/or embroidery in each of the fabric tiles on this quilt, all I got done was some background beading. It was the perfect project to start on.

I have several books that I refer to (Robin Atkins book and her brother Tom Atkins book) and I just started in working on each tile. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but its pretty fun. Beading actually goes faster than embroidery, and it is pretty easy on the hands too.

There were 54 tiles in this quilt. I am down to the last 12, and so I hope to have this completed to share at Quilting in the Garden. Hope to see you there!

Another Finish

This was a quilt blank that I made before my surgery. I had visions of some glorious embroidery covering the entire quilt. Unfortunately, following my surgery, I didn’t seem able to make even one decision on where and how to stitch.

Then one day, in a link from someone’s blog, I heard a well-known artist say that you would never  be able to recreate the vision that was in your head. Ha. Yes, that sounds very familiar. I ended up embroidering this piece pretty much the same way I stitch most pieces. Still, I am pleased with it.

I didn’t create it with “light” being the theme of the piece, but that seemed an obvious choice as I went along. I used Bible Gateway to search “light” in the New Testament, and picked out some of my favorite verses. I did have a new idea of filling the “frame” of this piece with these verses, and using the most familiar verse “I Am the Light of the World” as the header.

After it was all done, and bound and washed, I decided to try adding some beads to it.