Hopefully I will be teaching a new class at the Cotton Patch in Lafayette. Its Advanced Embroidered Quilting, and I am offering four different styles of quilting. Here are the four types of embroidered quilting I am offering to teach:
I’ll let you know when the classes will be as soon as I know. All of these projects were so much fun to do. Hopefully, other people will think the same thing!
Do you remember the series that I did about God’s characteristics that man could also try to emulate? (Gentle and Humble, Loving, etc?) Anyway, I made another quilt with just God’s characteristics on it.
And a close-up of the embroidery:
And then one day I was bored, and I remembered that I had this picture of a bird on my computer, and decided to embroider it.
Right now I am working on a large quilt that has very large flowers, etc. on it. I am doing kantha stitching and some cross-stitch in the background colors. Its going to take forever! And I am knitting 🙂
The day after Christmas, I started working on the “cow rug” seriously. I worked almost every day on it for hours. I had started it the year before at my Anaheim rug retreat, and I wanted to try to finish it to bring back and show to everyone this year.
Somehow I developed a fear of hooking the cows. So periodically I would write the goal to finish one cow. Here I put the baby on the hill above the mama.
I am very happy with these cows. I was actually able to make it clear that there was a baby and a mama stuck together.
This cow was my hardest. It is a Scottish Highland cow, and they have very long hair. I finally hooked it with an angora sweater that I had felted and dyed, and brushed the angora after I finished hooking it. I need to re-work the face a little. (the hair hangs over her eyes.)
Finally I was finished with the cows and the hills, and I needed a sky. So I googled sky images and used this one as inspiration. I was very happy when I gathered my wool fabrics and realized that I had plenty of wool in the right colors for the sky.
And here is the finished rug. Of course, its not completely finished. It needs to be blocked and have some finished touches put on it. In case you don’t remember, I chose cows from all over the world. The hills are from a picture I took of our local hills. That mountain is supposed to be Mount Zion. And the redwood trees were something that Gene (hooking teacher) and I came up with as a frame. Of course, redwood trees don’t really grow in my foothills, but they make such a nice frame, and I always think the redwoods seem like a cathedral. I used hand spun yarn and wool for the redwood leaves.
For my next project, I became enamored of these wonderful Egyptian tapestries. Here is their website.
I decided to do a series of these in rug hooking, displaying the life of Christ. As you can see, my drawings are quite elementary. I add stuff as I go along. I added more people, more plants, and you can see that I changed the branches from straight lines to more curvy lines. These are going to be small rugs, about 24″ tall, and probably a bit more in width. I do like that the Egyptian tapestries display plants from that area of the world, which is different than I would draw if I was using my local plants! This rug is Jesus feeding the 5000 people. Of course, I am not going to hook 5000 people 🙂
This is how much I accomplished in four days of rug hooking in Anaheim. Because these are smaller, and I want to get some details in, I am using #4 cuts, which are smaller than the #6 and #8 cuts that I usually use.
Well, I’ve been working away at my usual crafts. Just not taking time to blog about it. I’ll try to catch up with everything this week. But one thing I’ve been working on consistently is that big quilt that I was using a pattern for. The quilt was published in The Quilt Life magazine six years ago!
First I quilted all the churn dash blocks.
Next I drew hundreds of pomegranate designs on the quilt and quilted them.
Then it was time to add a couple of big rows of leaves and vines.
And THEN there were two big rows of feathers. I also decided to put feathers all the way around the outside border. That is the only change I made in the quilt.
And finally (even though you could see them in the previous pictures,) I started adding hundreds and thousands of bubbles to outline the pomegranates and leaves. Just about every day I would spend some time working on these. My eyes got very tired, and I asked my long arm friend about it. She said I needed to blink my eyes more!
And then on Friday, all of a sudden, I was done with all the bubbles! Saturday I put the binding on and washed it. I am too short, so even though I was standing on a stepladder, I couldn’t get a great picture of the finished quilt. But you can get the idea. Just in time to keep me warm all winter. Its fun having a quilt that hangs over the edges of the bed more than most of my quilts do.
I’m working on several projects (of course) and am enjoying spinning and knitting as well. I’ll post a few more times this week to try to catch up on my projects.
One thing most crafters have in common is a love of new equipment. Especially if it is equipment that can make life easier for you. I enjoy turning a skein of yarn into a nice ball of yarn. But holding it over my knees is not that fun. My rug hooking friend told me about this table top swift that he found on eBay. So of course I had to check it out. The only swifts I had ever seen were ones that clamp onto something, which is sometimes not so convenient. I love this table top swift. It holds the yarn nicely, and when you are done, it folds up and doesn’t take up much room.
And then… And then I decided to bring my spinning wheel back into the house… Oh my. There’s the Distraction. Spinning your own yarn is so fun, and so pleasurable. After I brought it in, nothing but spinning got done for almost two weeks.
I found some variegated green roving that would work well for the redwood trees on my current rug, and I spun that up. To make a balanced yarn, you usually spin up two bobbins of thread and then ply them together, and voila!
You have a beautiful skein of yarn.
Here’s how I’m incorporating it into the rug. I like the way it looks.
And then… then I found about 8 ounces of a fiber blend I made long ago. I used to make fiber blends and sell them at spinning and weaving events. I called this one Apple Blossoms. It is 40% angora (rabbit,) 30% silk, and 30% merino wool. Its oh so soft, and it brings back such good memories for me.
So now I’ve got the spinning bug out of me for a wee bit, and I am back to working on my rug. There’s only a few weeks before Cambria Pines Rug Camp, and I want to get more of it done before I go. Because at rug camp I will be starting an entirely new rug!
In the next two weeks, I am hoping to get back in the studio to do a bit of quilting and piecing, and also, I want to dye some wool and silk before I leave for camp. After camp I have big plans to make a fiber blend and get to spinning that. I’m sure you’ll hear more about that in the next few months 🙂
This year the word I seem to use most often is relaxing. I say to others, “I hope you have a wonderful relaxing Christmas!” I wish the same to all of you, my friends.
For unto us a child is born,
Unto us a son is given.
and the government shall be upon his shoulder.
And his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor,
The Mighty God,
Everlasting Father,
Prince of Peace.
On Sunday I doodled this in my journal:
Do all of you have a box of two inch squares? I love my box, and it has come in handy so many times. Truth is, I have so many two inch squares, I now have two boxes of them. Whenever I get to the end of a project and there are good scraps left, I cut them into two inch squares. When I cut the excess backing fabric off of a finished quilt, more two inch squares.
Okay, so choosing the path of least resistance (pre-cut pieces, and sitting in my easy chair) I chose to try doing this by hand stitching with the box of two inch squares. Each cross takes 5 two inch squares. I found quickly that the easiest way to keep from being confused was to stitch the crosses, and THEN join them.
When I have done single motif hand stitched quilts in the past (hexagons and diamonds) I have always joined a certain amount and then started another piece, simply because it was easier to handle smaller pieces of fabric. So that’s what I did here.
And I found that there is NO WAY to join these pieces without leaving one or two block empty spots. There’s got to be some mathematical reason for this…
Now you can see in my doodles, that I actually drew the crosses with spaces in between them. I also took some graph paper last night and tried to figure out what the problem is. It is actually hard to DRAW the crosses without leaving empty spaces between them. It is not hard to sew them together without empty spaces.
For now, it is an experiment (albeit an experiment that I have spent a good part of the week on.) I could choose to leave spaces on purpose (that I could easily fill in with more two inch squares.) Or I can just work on joining them together into one continuous quilt. I do like them joined the way I have them now. If any of you want to try this, I can tell you that it seems that to be joined without “spaces,” you either need to join 3 or 6 sides, if that makes sense.
Did you know that this weekend is International Quilting Weekend? The Quilt Show is opening ALL 220 of their shows for the whole weekend! You can check out all your favorite quilt artists to your heart’s content, all for free. Here’s the link to how to do it. There is also a huge contest with lots of great prizes that you can enter for free. I am still a huge fan of TQS, and look forward to the new video that comes out every two weeks. If you haven’t already seen it, my show is number 1512.
I have lots to tell you about. But it seems I can’t stop knitting long enough to write a real post…
When I was in Anaheim for my rug hooking retreat, my friend Shelley wrote about a new knitting project she was working on–a blanket made out of leftover yarn and mitered squares. Before I became a quilter I spun and knit all the time, and mitered squares were one of my favorite techniques. I do still have lots of leftover yarn from my knitting days, and now I can’t stop. Just one more square….
If you haven’t tried mitered square knitting, don’t start. I’m warning you. Its addicting.
I’ll be back later to catch you up on other projects I am working on.
A couple of posts ago, I wrote about “needing” something to hand sew (embroider) in the evenings. Vickie asked about how my hands were holding up. Actually, I wanted something to hand embroider on BECAUSE of my hands.
I had carpal tunnel surgery five years ago. Before having the surgery done, I had carpal tunnel syndrome for about 10 years. Carpal tunnel affects different people in different ways. For me, it meant that I just couldn’t do any handwork before noon (my hands would go numb)…and of course, it did hurt if I used my hands for too long. I got carpal tunnel from knitting (literally) hundreds of hats on circular needles, which kept your wrists bent in a non-ergonomic way. I would wake up with my hands in that same cramped position.
So now, I am very aware of my hands. I want to keep using them as long as possible. And that is why I wanted something to hand embroider. If I have several different types of handwork to do, I can rotate, and each thing uses my hands in a different way. I was knitting and making yo yo’s a lot, and knew I needed to vary what I was doing. Hand embroidery, as long as I am using good fabric (NOT batik, too tight a weave) and nice batting (really nice cotton or wool) is easy on my hands.
I do most of my binding by machine. My BF did give me these clips, which are really helpful. Recently I used them when I whipped the edge of a rug. They eliminate the need for pinching the fabric together, which I find hard on my hands. Here is a link to my yo yo maker. They are fun and addicting to make. That’s why I needed something else to work on 🙂
debby quilts 