Ta Da!!

This turned out to be such a fun project! It went well beyond “stupid sewing” 🙂 While I was sewing the little blocks together I noticed a sparkly thread on my sewing table that looked like it went with the blocks. So I thought I might try a meandering thread through the piece. Then I added some black lines and some french knots. Yesterday morning I got up and put a binding on it. Finished, I thought! But then I thought it would be fun to add some words to it. This time, instead of a Bible verse, I wanted to add a saying that a good quilting friend had shared with me. Thanks, Catherine!! I really love this saying.

She was unstoppable. Not because she did not have failures or doubts but because she continued on despite them.       –Beau Taplin

The really finished quilt:

A close-up:

Today I’m planning to get back to some rug hooking, work on my big PEACE rug for a bit, and get the dye studio ready for a session of dying tomorrow. I LOVE a free week!!

Instagram!

Hi all. I am trying out Instagram. I thought it might be fun to add a picture of what I work on each day. So far I have shared these two pictures.

My big PEACE quilt:

And my “cow rug.” I’m very excited about the changes I’ve made on this rug. I added large lettering, eliminated the field (there will be hills in the background behind the lettering.) I plan to add more cows and also need to add in the greenery to the redwood tree borders.

My instagram label is debbyschnabel.

Momentum

A few weeks ago, I made a little “in the meantime” piece because I had “nothing” to work on in the evenings–no handwork.

Since then I have embraced the kantha blanket, and have begun the long journey of repetitive stitching that I had planned for it.

And then, I finally bit the bullet and started a new project that I had been mulling over since last December.

Can you guess what it is? I am doing a quilt of “The Hallelujah Chorus.” It has long been one of my favorite pieces of music. When I lived in Texas, our church choir sang it, and we were required to memorize it. The words are magnificent, and have so much meaning to me. I had the idea when I went last December to a beautiful cathedral in downtown Sacramento for a performance of The Messiah. My little idea was that the quilt had to be extremely beautiful, mostly white, with perfect extensive quilting, and of course, the words would be preeminent, and of course beautiful calligraphy. Hmmm. See why I was afraid to start it?

A little thought came along–why don’t you do what you know you can do well? So I decided to use my own handwriting, and to make my circles with embroidery. I bought some silk-type fabric at Joann’s to practice on, and it turned out that I really liked this fabric, so I stuck with it.

I wanted the piece to be a bit larger than most of my embroidered works, so I came up with the idea of doing the circles and the words in separate panels, and then after all of them are embroidered, I will join them into one quilt top and add more quilting.

All I can say is, you just have to try. It very well could have been that these things would not have worked. Heck, they still might not work. But by trying, even if I fail, I have learned something new.

And now, I must leave you. I have a bit of stitching to do 🙂

Machine Lettering

Today I will show you two more special Christmas presents I made, and also talk about writing on cloth. I made these two pillows for my brother and my sister. My dad died in 2011, and he loved Pendleton shirts, silk ties, and the Word of God, not necessarily in that order. So I had been thinking about some project including his shirts and ties for a while. When I took Pepper Cory‘s class on the folded log cabin, I knew I’d found the right technique. (The folded log cabin is stitched completely by hand. Its a nifty technique, and I recommend taking Pepper’s class if you ever have the opportunity. She taught it expertly in just three hours!)

I first saw words used as a “quilting motif” in a lecture by John Flynn. I was fascinated! I think I’ve always liked putting words in my needlework (I used to do a lot of counted cross stitch.) So looking back, I can see that putting words on my quilts was a natural evolution.

Writing is one of the things that is easiest to do when you first start free motion machine quilting. Think about it–its one of the things you are the most familiar with drawing–you’ve been doing it your whole life!

I usually start by printing out the verse on a piece of paper. I measure the area where I plan to place the words on the quilt, and divide to see how many lines I can put in that area. Then I count the words and see how many letters I need to put on each line. This is all approximate, because sometimes my writing comes out differently than I had planned. Then you can do just like they do in books–crowd the writing to make it all fit in.

Here you can see how I backstitch at the beginning and end of each word. Then I just lift the presser foot and move to the place where I want to start the next word. After I am done with a line, I take those little snips and cut the threads right next to the stitching.

Just a closer look:

Another view, where I started and stopped more frequently, so there are more dangling threads. I always start by bringing the bobbin thread up to the top. In this view, you can see the chalk like that I drew to keep the writing straight. I do this especially when the writing is larger.

And this is a picture of my favorite little chalk tool. It is a Clover device, and you can see the tiny little gear at the top that lets the chalk out in a very fine line. It draws on cloth so much easier and more accurately than a pencil. And it also erases easily when you are done with it. Sometimes I use the disappearing blue pen, but only when I plan to wash the quilt before I use/sell it.

(do you see how the writing is a little wavy in the picture above? That is because I forgot to lower the feed dogs, so there was more tension than usual as I stitched!)

And the finished writing with all the threads clipped.

I made the pillows using a very simple overlapping technique. For these 16 inch pillows, each back flap was 12 inches X 16 inches, so there was about 8 inches of overlap. Its a lazy way of making a pillow–no fasteners needed.

You might wonder about the verses I chose. I asked my brother and sister separately if they remembered what Dad’s favorite verse was. (Dad LOVED scripture. I knew he had a lot of favorites.) So each of these were verses that Dad loved, but that had special significance for my brother and sister as well. I loved the entire process of making these pillows.