Tag: mini quilts

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Stitching in Circles

So much for getting an 8 X 10″ done quickly!  The fabric in the center of this little project has a pattern of various size circles woven into it, and I am highlighting those circles with stitching:

Of course, I am already running into a problem I encounter with nearly every art quilt I make: how and when do I quilt it?  The more embellishing that goes on the quilt, the more I have knots and  other thread mess on the back, but I have to add a backing and quilt through it at some point without destroying the embellishing or the sewing machine in the process.  Maybe through using these little quilts as experiments, I will finally come to a technique to solve my quilting issues.

I love this color combination, and I am thinking about making some Creative Kits with it soon.  It captures the aqua blue of the robin’s eggs that I always find this time of year, the purple of the wisteria blooms outside of my bedroom window and the bright greens of the springtime hayfields all around me.

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Time Flown Away

Where is 2019 going?  It is April 2, and I am looking at my list of goals and looking for evidence of progress.  I am not finding it.  Sadly, I have missed all of my planned entry deadlines, but I still intend on finishing the collages that I started or planned… someday.

I have written about this before, but I will keep bringing it up, being creative is not easy.  I struggle to balance creative time with everything else in my life, and the creative time itself does not always go well.  Most of the fabric collages that I make go through an incredibly ugly stage that I have to fight through to keep working on them, and eventually, they usually work out in the end.  When I reach that halfway point, it is a huge challenge for me to keep going, and I often have to put the piece aside for a while.  This leads to missed goals and deadlines, but I am not letting it discourage me from learning more and trying to continue in my creative journey.

While I am grumbling about my lack of progress this year, I must address my plan to create an 8 x 10″ art quilt each week for the year.  No, that project is not going as planned.   I have managed to finish this little riot of texture:

Pink and Brown Something

I am going to revamp this project slightly.  In hopes of helping myself with this goal, I am going to attempt to give myself more direction and go back to the projects that I have flagged in my collection of Quilting Arts magazine, and use those as a means to create the 8 x 10s and reach two goals at once – the regular production of small pieces and trying all those techniques that piqued my creative mind.  I’m off to figure out the first project.  I think I will start with the earliest issue.

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Unfinished Business

I still have not made any progress on the pieces for fast approaching deadlines.  The 3-D entry is not going to happen, at least not for its intended show.  I’ll keep working on it and use it for some other show entry.  I have not made a single stitch yet on the two Upcycle entries.  I’ve simply allowed myself to be distracted by other ongoing projects, so at least I am getting back into a creative groove.  One of the things that I have made progress on are some of my mini quilt collages:

The fabrics in these three “sketches” are scraps of my own hand dyes in the “Madri Gras” color blend.  The one on the far left was stamped with antique wallpaper pattern stamps and acrylic paint, then embellished with funky yarns.  The center one has strips of silk scraps to create a very skewed frame to the composition, then I seed stitched all over to secure the top two layers before pillowcase binding it.  On the far right, trial with using embroidery stitches to create textural interest in the solid colored shapes.  I still need do some final machine quilting in all of them.

I have no idea what I will work on this weekend, and I think that I am going to scale back to posting once a week until I get some issues worked out with the back end of this site.