Tag: thread art

It Gives New Meaning to Frogging…

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Okay, I admit it. I cannot stop myself from drawing stuff on customer quilts that they don’t ask for.  One of my customers has nicknamed me “Sneaky.”  The problem is… I’ll be quilting along and my brain will say that something such as a frog would look cool on this quilt.

Bob's little pony 008

Now, I know better than that!  It’s not my quilt, and I tell my brain that, but before I know it, I am stitching a frog into the quilt.  I honestly don’t know what happened to me with this quilt.  I am quite embarrassed at how bold my “evil twin sister” was in putting these items on this customer quilt.  All I wanted was for my quilting to complement the customers quilt top.

Wilmas quilt 2 final 005  Wilmas quilt 2 final 006  Wilmas quilt 2 final 007

Did you notice they are all drawn into the black spaces where they can easily be seen?  WTH???  I get embarrassed by my quilting anyhow and don’t want it screaming at the world, so what came over me (oops! I mean my evil twin sister) with this one?

For those of you who don’t know what frogging is to a quilter, it’s where you rip out the stitches… rip it… rip it… rip it…  Get it?  I can only hope the customer will be okay with the results of this quilt, or I will certainly be frogging this one next week.  😦

What she really wanted was viney leaves and flowers to match her applique.  This is what I did before adding my trademark signature “surprise” of thread art…

Wilmas quilt 2 final 013

She also wanted piano keys, but she was worried how the green thread would show up against the orange striped border.  I was a bit worried how it would look, too, so I stitched right inside the parts with the green in it to help the green thread blend into the background (so how come my evil twin sister was so brazen with the creatures stitched into the black fabric?).

wilma 2 006

That meant I would need to measure out the stitching along the sides to match the different piano key widths of the bottom and top.  My straight line stitching needs a lot of practice… sigh…

wilma 2 005

But, here is the finished product.  From here, you can’t see any of the stitching, for which I am truly grateful.

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I love her applique work and the way she brought it all together!

 

Hide & Seek in the Hexie Garden

Cowtown Quilts4 Comments

I’ve been working on a quilt for Mickey Depre.  You may or may not know her as the author of

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You can find Mickey on Facebook at www.facebook.com/PiecedHexiesWithMickeyDepre.  She also has a website at www.mdquilts.com and her blog is at www.itsafiberlife.blogspot.com.  Mickey has a very creative mind that often goes in overdrive, so she has been very busy lately.  Just this week she was working on taping videos for Craftsy and she is currently in the process of writing her next pieced hexies book as well.

So, she asked me to help her out a bit with this (what I call “vintage”) quilt top she got from ebay.   She needed it quilted and she gave me full range on what I thought should be done with it.  You know, that can be lethal, for some people.  Well, I sure didn’t want to mess it up, and, honestly, I wondered why on earth she would choose me to quilt for her.  So, I was going to do my best with what I’ve got.

mdquilt 002

And, what I’ve got is the ability to draw from pictures using thread.  Would that make me a thread artist then?  I LOVE whimsy and fun things, so I knew I wanted to draw stuff like that on her quilt… if she was okay with that.  And, she was!  For whatever reason, in my mind I pictured her dog peeking around the baskets and playing in this garden of hexie flowers.  So, although I was going to quilt the flowers to look like flowers, there were 2 side borders that needed to be filled with <something>.  I extended flowers and leaves into those borders, added a few baskets of flowers and put a couple of dogs out in that negative space as well.

Here is a shot of flowers in the baskets.

Mickey's final quilt 014

The backing fabric is 100% combed cotton.  I thought it was polished cotton and bought it because some friends said the feel of that polished cotton on the backs of quilts is scrumptious.   When I got it home and took it out of its protective wrap, it looked like cotton sateen.  Okay, I think I can live with that.  But, I was almost horrified when I took the quilt off the machine after quilting this quilt and looked at the back.  Most great quilters I know like to quilt with solid colored fabric and, even better, they like to quilt with unusual fabrics, mostly to show off the quilting.  You can’t see the quilting too well on the front sides of quilts, but if you have a solid color backing, you can see it there.  And, you can “really” see it well if it is on shiny fabric.  This is where my horror lay.  It looked like satin on the back of this down-to-earth and “functional” quilt.  Not only that, but you could REALLY see my quilting!  My eyes bulged and I lost my breath (and not in a good way).  You see, I am still a little insecure about my quilting abilities and am not sure I’m ready to have my thread art screaming to the world, “Look at me!  Look at me!”

I tried to get some good shots so you could see the “sheen” of this backing fabric.  Here is one of the flowers.

Mickey's final quilt 005

Do you see the dog wagging its tail?

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Here’s one of the dog’s face.

Mickey's final quilt 007

Here’s a few of the front side.   Mickey and her husband are hockey fans, I believe, so it would have been nice to add that to the quilt for one more personal touch.  But, how do you get that to fit in a spring garden?  Well, soccer is *kind of* like hockey, right?  So, I put a soccer ball in the garden for their dog to play with.

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Their dog looking at the soccer ball…

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Here is one of the wonky baskets of flowers I quilted into the side borders.

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And, finally, before I was done, I had to add one more picture of their dog in the middle of the bottom of the quilt, peeking out at them.  You might barely be able to make out the “Peek a Boo!” I quilted right above the dog.  The word “Peek” is right under the pink flower on the left.  It’s written at an angle into an arc around the top of the dog.  Can you find it?

I had so much fun quilting this for Mickey.  I hope she will be happy with the quilting and can live with the backing fabric.  O_O

If you haven’t had a chance yet, hop on over to Mickey’s website  and take a look at some of her creative work!