Beth quilts!

At last! All of my deadlines are met. (I did do a super secret project that you will be able to see this fall.) And I can finally get back to my own applique project. The project went into hibernation when my crazy travel schedule started, but more importantly, when I couldn't decide on a background. I really, really, really loved the one on the left, but it does overpower the applique, sigh. And the one on the right is too close in color to the larkspurs.

One of the nice things about travel is the opportunity to visit new quilt shops. If only I could remember which city this was in! I came home with several candidates for the background, and this one won. It's a little more vibrant than this shows, it's mostly a robin's egg blue with hints of a purple undertone.

So, with that, I could get back to the embellishing. My mind is just too literal sometimes, and I just couldn't get past the idea that veins are usually indented, not elevated. Embroidered lines are elevated. Luckily I hadn't gotten very far (I think I knew I wasn't going to like it in my heart of hearts), so it wasn't hard to pick out.

I did want to add more dimension to the roses, so I pulled out the heat n sta fleece from Floriani.  It's what I used on the basket rim and base.

Using my trusty light box and a sharpie pen, I traced the shapes I wanted to emphasize, and then cut them out. After the first one I realized that there was no need to trace each shape if I was going to cut it out as a unit.

There were also places that I wanted to really push forward, so additional little bits were cut. My original plan was to layer the fleece with the smallest parts pressed in place first, and then secured with the larger, overlapping piece. But in the end I decided to do just the opposite, adding the smaller bits on top of the larger, hoping that would reduce any lines or sharp drop offs.

My next thought was that I needed to add free motion veins in my emphasized areas before I put the motifs on the background, which would allow those areas to retain their puff.

From the back side you can see how the fleece was layered and then stitched through. Every one of this steps are a bit of an experiment for me. I'll only know if they were effective when the quilt is done. It's so very lovely to have the time to hash this out. A project without a deadline is just way more fun.

The remaining embellishment will have to wait until the motifs are stitched to the background. The roses and basket are in place, the little yellow flowers are awaiting their placement. Now, if only I could remember where I put the leaves and larkspurs. Well, where ever they are, I'm sure they're safe.

It's Camp Loopy Time!

I love Camp Loopy. Yes, I realize it's just a ploy to get me to buy wool yarn in the summer, but it's a fun ploy and there are prizes. Our first project kicks off on June 1st.

Because knitting something in a month is not hard enough, I decided to up the ante this month by spinning the wool for the yarn. The Loopy Ewe now sells wool roving, so using it spin will qualify me in the challenge.

This is the Purple Mustang colorway of Lorna's Laces wool roving top. Top means that the fibers have been combed out nicely for spinning, ready to go. This one wasn't. It was kind of matted.

I've been wanting to do a shawl with color gradations, so I knew that I would be combing it out anyway, so on I went.

 The first step was to tear the roving apart to separate the different values. Working light to dark, the hunks of roving were sorted into individual stacks of shades of purple.

From there, each hank was combed, using nearly lethal wool combs. The tines are very, very sharp, and it took just a couple of pokes for me to come to respect the tools.

The roving includes both red purple and blue purple, making it a bit of a challenge to sort out the values. The blue purples just looked darker. To solve the problem, I used my camera, set to black & white, to rearrange the combed blobs in value order. See how the colorless photo helps to block out the confusing color. I use this trick with my applique as well, when a subtle value shift is important.

I want to make a lace weight, or light fingering weight yarn. This is pretty fine yarn, used for knitting shawls and socks. Ultimately the yarn will be two ply, so I separated the value gradations in two.

Finally ready for spinning, the fluffs of wool have been stacked up in a basket, near at hand for spinning.

I've finished spinning the first run of fiber, and am about half way on the second. I'm still undecided on whether I will spin the whole lot as a two ply for a shawl, or go for a three ply and make a pair of socks. We shall see.

Knitting for the first project starts on June 1st. The Loopy Ewe gave me permission to start early on the spinning, since it's neither casting on or knitting. So hopefully, by the time you are reading this, I will be done with the spinning and ready to knit.

Where I've been

Well, hello! You're still here! How lovely of you to keep checking in while I have clearly checked out.

It has been a crazy travel year for me. I had set up a perfect schedule, with just enough trips, when two offers came in that I just couldn't say "no" to, starting with a trip to Denver in January to tape with Craftsy.

Then there was Atlanta, GA, and Fort Worth and Arlington, Texas. Arriving extra early for the Texas trip, I was able to spend a delightful afternoon at the Dallas Arboretum. Oh, my, it was a sight for sore eyes, this beautiful day of color and sunshine. We've had such a dreary winter here in Michigan. These teaching trips have the side benefit of recharging my color-deprived winter soul.

With hardly a moment to catch my breath, I was off again, this time to Portland, OR. The invitation to add this retreat sponsored by Quiltmaker to my "perfect" schedule is one that I will never regret accepting. Not only did I have class after class of marvelous students, the organizers made it easy for we teachers to find time to chat.

Most of the time we work alone, flying from guild to guild to do our job. The opportunity to chat with our peers is priceless. We can learn so much from each other about the business of teaching, and dealing with the downsides of being an itinerant teacher.

The folks at Quiltmaker put on a fabulously fun retreat. Even if the next one is not nearby, it is worth the trip.



In April I was back in Denver for the Arapahoe Quilt Guild of Denver (hello all you clever quilters!), and taught for two more guilds here in Michigan.

May started with a delightful trip to Duluth, MN. Just like Saginaw, Duluth was also hanging on to winter with a death grip. Quilters braved freezing rain and snow to drive from near and afar to get to the classes. (Thank you for that!)

Helen, the organizer, and I have been playing calendar tag for ages. It has taken some time for the trip to actually come to be, and we were both excited to have the trip finally happen. She was so happy that she ordered cupcakes for us decorated with the design of the class project. How very cool is that?

Helen is delightful, and so are the rest of the guild members. I almost always enjoy the people I meet on the road, but sometimes I meet someone that I just bond with. Helen is one of them.

The students were very productive, and a joy. The chemistry was so perfect, they played along so beautifully.

As always, I have been tinkering around with how I teach my classes. I've revamped the Forget Me Not project. The new way gives the students time to get more of the project done in class.We were all very pleased with the results!

I have one more trip to go, I'm off to Big Rapids, MI next Saturday to lecture at their quilt show, and then I have a travel break until mid-September, and no other deadlines. Whoo-hoo! I'm taking a summer sabbatical. I'm not really sure what that means, other than I'm giving myself the gift of a "should-free" summer. What gets done gets done, whether it's work in the studio, gardening, spinning, knitting or simply contemplating my navel. My mother's day gift was a new hammock, and I intend to wear it out.

Really?

Can it have been more than a month since I've last posted? Honestly? I guess it would be an understatement to say that I've been busy. But a whole month? Geesh.

In the weeks since I last posted I have been to Dallas, TX, Portland, OR, Brighton, MI and Denver, Co. This Saturday I'll be teaching in St. Clair, MI. In a couple weeks it will be Duluth, MN. Who schedules these things?

The only sewing I've done has been step outs for a couple of new classes, and some mending. Mending! Hubby likes to pull the corner off of his shirt pockets. It's an engineer thing, probably due directly to the death of pocket protectors.

I have been spinning, though. It's been my quiet respite from the noisy world. It's so calming that I sometimes almost doze off. I'm making stuff that more or less would pass for actual yarn. And I've been reminded that my goal is not to try make my handspun to look like commercial yarn, because I can buy that. I still have a lot to learn. Having finally figured out how to spin fine enough to make sock weight yarn, I am struggling to get back to sweater weight yarn.  Good thing thick and thin spots are all part of the beauty of handspun yarn. (That's my story and I'm sticking with it.)

To continue my current state of crazy, I just bought a rigid heddle loom. It's just a wee thing, not a behemoth floor loom. I figure I can weave up all of this newly spun yarn faster than I could ever possibly knit it. It's another new thing to learn, with an entire new vocabulary. But I've gone from "what the heck does that mean?" to understanding the basic techniques. So far I've woven a nice set of placemats, which is sort of like buying a $XXK sewing machine to sew straight seams. Oh wait, I did that too.

Of course, all of this falderal means I now have two new stashes to make room for. Wool for spinning is light weight, but very bulky. And then there is the yarn that I've spun. My "limited" space for stashing yarn is now bubbling over into my sewing space.

The yarns for weaving come on ginormous cones. Where on earth am I going to store those? And the tools! It's a 24 inch loom, the heddles and shuttles are 26 inches long.

On the quilting front, I did manage to find 16 fat quarters to bring home from Denver. They are for a project for a special edition of Quiltmaker Magazine, which will be out in the fall. Since my deadline is mid-May, I think I'd better get cracking on that.

I think I need a fiber intervention.

To bead or not to bead

Moving along on the Of a Summer's Day quilt. Progress has been slow since being seduced by a spinning wheel, but there's progress nevertheless. Deciding how to embellish the appliques is a bit of a challenge to me. I'm not really big on glitz and glamour, but a well placed bead is a thing of beauty.

I started by leafing through an old picture book of rose botanicals, looking for just the right center treatment for my old fashion roses. Once I found the look I was after, I marked the centers with concentric circles. (A circle template from an office supply or drafting store is a marvelous thing.) The size and placement were done totally by gosh and by golly. I did make a small attempt to center the middle circle, but there was no measuring involved. The circles also varied from flower to flower.

I gathered up the tools for embellishing and set to work. Starting with straight stitches from the center to the outer ring, I used the darker variegated thread to create the stamens. I rustled up a strip of wool I had cut and stashed in my aborted stab at rug making, to create the centers.

It sat at that stage (and of course, I didn't take a picture) for several days while I wrestled with the decision between french knots and beads. I had already done french knots on the tiny yellow flowers, so adding them to the roses felt a little redundant. I worried that beads would have too much dimension and take away from the applique. In the end I realized that delica beads would be no bigger than french knots and got to work.

But now the centers still seemed to be missing something. More dimension maybe? Maybe I could use the yarn again, as I did in the basket, and stitch in a little trapunto under the wool centers.

I don't know why this little bag of felt balls was lying out on my table, but there it was. Hmmm. First I had to work through the thought that it wasn't okay to cut these little gems into smaller curves. Perhaps there are felt ball police who make rules about these things. It could happen! But I got over that.

There you go, now we're talking. The little burst of green in the center of all that red, perfect! Next I had to decide how to attach it. I could use a permanent fiber glue, which would preserve the roundedness of the center, but I just couldn't bring myself to glue something to a quilt. I know other people do it, but it's just not really for me. Besides, the bubble of felt looked too fake to me.

 So, stitching it down was the way to go. I used a dab of the glue I use for applique to hold it in place, a slightly darker green floss and a simple running stitch. I like how the stitches create yet another circle. (Yeah, the appliques are covered with glue. It will likely rub off while I'm stitching the appliques to the background and then quilting the snot out of it.)

Next step is to add veins to the petals. I've used two strands of a six strand floss, and I'm not sure if I like it. The lines feel a little too pronounced. I may try a single strand, or I may add the veins when quilting, or, I might just keep going as is. These things must be done del.i.cate.ly, my pretties!

Spinning my wheel

I've been bitten, bitten hard. Everyone needs a hobby, right? When my quilting hobby became my job, I needed to find something new to do, just so I wasn't working all the time.

I've been a fiber maniac my whole life. From four on, when my grandmother taught me how to embroider, I have spent my entire life either playing with fiber or figuring out how to get more fiber. One thing I had never done was spin wool into yarn.

In my down time I've been hanging out at Twisted Warps and Skeins, playing with their assortment of spinning wheels.There are so many factors to consider before choosing a wheel. Just as in quilting, spinning has a vocabulary of its own. While Pam and Dale tried to convince me to take my time before making a purchase, I just knew that I needed to have a wheel at home to be able to practice in a quiet space.

They had me spend some time on this used wheel, an Ashford Traveller, then offered it to me at an awesome price, and it became mine.

This is the first yarn that I spun. It's pretty much a disaster. Too thick in some spots and too thin in others, and over twisted throughout. I was just going to dump it, it's a small expense, just about the cost of a yard of fabric, and I figured I'd learned everything I needed to learn out of that fiber. But no, Dale said I had to take it home.

So I turned it into "art yarn". I've finally found a use for the crock pot that the men in the family despised. Several packs of Kool Aid, and a soak in the pot for a bit, and now I've dyed my first yarn. It's just crazy yarn, and I'm thinking I'll knit it up with ginormous needles and then felt it, perhaps into a seat cover for my desk chair. Or, something cozy to toss into Gracie's crate.

Learning something entirely new has been good for my soul. It has reminded me of how lost one can be when learning a new process, how terms that are second nature to us can be mysterious and confusing to beginners. It's given me something to be bad at, and yet enjoy the process of getting better. As I always say, anything worth doing is worth doing badly for as long as it takes.

Four Backgrounds

While I still have some embellishing to do, it's time to settle down into choosing a background. Usually I just know what I want to do, and just go ahead and do it. This time, not so much.

This is the pieced background. It's more blue than the photo, but the darker accent fabric does have a grey undertone. I'm just not feeling it. It seems as though the background can't stand up to the vibrant colors of the applique. What do you think?

This is choice number two. I love the print, but I think the fabric is just a little too purple.I fear that the purple larkspurs would be completely lost. So the question becomes, do I keep the background and make the larkspurs over in blues?

What do you think of this one? I only did a close up because the flash was washing it out. (Yet another dark and grey day here, with six inches of fresh snow over night.)

While I like the silveryness of it, it also feels a little underwhelming compared to the appliques. So, do I want a quiet place for the applique to shine, a background that truly fades into the background? This fabric would give the whole piece a bit of understated elegance.



And then there's this background.

Wowsers! I am really, really liking this. I like the linear, yet curvy print. It reminds me of a tin ceiling, only on drugs. The flash has washed out the color a bit around the applique, and I like that effect. I'm going to see if I can mimic that with pastels or water color pencils.

I can imagine following the print on the fabric for machine quilting, it would give it a tufted appearance, especially if I put a small something in the centers of the tiniest squares, like a bead, maybe?

Can you help me choose? Really, I'd love your opinion. Shall I go for a quiet or bold background? Beaded background, really?