We had 12 people in the class learning the steps to create a Morning Glory quilt that was designed by Roxanne; Roxanne is over in the left hand side of the photo in pink. Mary and Donna are working diligently in the foreground.
The class focused on the steps to turn a photo into a small art quilt with a minimum of applique and lots of painting with acrylics to emphasize the shading. We worked from a pattern she provided and it ended up being as she said "paint by numbers" except in my case, my lines were so faded, I finally gave up on them almost entirely and just did my own thing which was challenging as I didn't have the original picture to look at!!
Another classmate concentrating! I was really tired by the time I got home from this class .
Dena checking on another's piece.
My tablemate Sally who made the day much more fun than it would have been!! She laughed at all my comments!
This is my piece before I added any of the paints or stitching. You can barely see the lines where I am to paint so I improvised quite a bit rather than wondering across the room to look at Roxanne's original piece.
You will see how different everyone's pieces looks when you see mine. This one is Dena's.
This is Donna's. These two both show a lot of depth which mine doesn't. They haven't picked out their backgrounds yet either.
Being the compulsive person that I am about finishing things, I did the machine quilting and facing today as well as adding a hanging sleeve. I am relatively pleased even though it is a far cry from the original.
There will be less writing as I had the whole blog written, somehow hit the wrong key and erased the whole thing!! These first pictures are of many of the neonatal quilts turned in this month. You will recognize some of mine as I turned in 9 myself. We delivered over 350 this year to the unit.
The next two are by our very prolific Betty V. She recently returned from a trip to Newfoundland and we found that we both had a shared enthusiasm for a Canadian show called Republic of Doyle -- great show on Prime and Netflix.
These next two quilts were done from patterns designed by our own Michelle May!! They are wool applique.
This gorgeous top was done by Candy L despite the fact that she hasn't been able to return to her residence since Hurricane Florence hit in 2018. She hopes to be back in by Christmas.
These next three pieces were done by Donna B . The first two are totally painted. The blog she shares with her sister has a link on the left hand side of my blog
This gorgeous quilt was done by a relative newby quilter -- amazing. Can't imagine what she will be doing in a few years!
I really liked this pattern and it will be perfect to add to my list of 4-patch quilts for which I have a Pinterest board now!!
I missed a lot of the quilts and there was just too many this month (at least 25).
It was a lovely program today with Roxanne Lessa (Roxanne's Blog and Website). Her quilts were just beautiful and I look forward to the class tomorrow. She is teaching some fabric painting but almost all the quilts she showed had lots of hand dyed fabric so I want to know if she did the dyeing as well as the painting. I thought this was just a beautiful piece. Although the class will feature raw edge applique, this piece uses a different technique -- one she learned from Carol Bryer Fallert. It sounded a great deal like the technique I learned many years ago from Nancy Murty -- kind of a form of machine applique with invisible thread and using a hemming stitch.
Her lecture was on basic color theory and very thorough. Years ago I taught a very small class at a local quilt show on color theory and her approach was just about identical to mine. Because I had to fill a bit more time, I did an exercise with my group. I gave each pair of two (there were about 16 people I think) a packet of solid fabrics and had a color wheel on an easel. Their assignment was to identify the colors which sounds simple but definitely isn't as there just aren't any pure colors and of course you are dealing with tones, shades and tints of the standard hues. I think almost everyone in the group went out and bought a color wheel! It is very helpful when you are trying to determine what complementary colors you might deal with or implementation of any of the other arrangements (split complementary, triadic, etc.) Even now I occasionally take mine out when I can't quite visualize the components.
This was based on pictures she took at Bryce Canyon. She uses paint to do some additional shading and highlighting. It was a beautiful piece as all of hers were!!
This was a study of Crepe Myrtle, a definitely southern tree.
I just loved this piece -- it is just so fluid and of course the colors are fantastic!
I will save all the Neo-natal and Show and Tell quilts for another blog -- there were a lot!!
Tomorrow, though, I will be off in class and will take my camera of course!
It's nice to actually be doing something new for a change after quilting all those tops.
The green is really a richer green than shows up here. You can see that I did decide to go with a very thin strip of white going around the panel and I cut off a couple of inches from the width so that it is a square 24 inches. And then the fun began!!
I thought I had calculated correctly the width of the different strips around the blocks but I ended up ripping out stitches twice on the first block as the first was too small and the second too large (I thought). So I made four for the bottom of the quilt and after all this realized that my calculations for the second time I did the block were correct. Oh well, will improvise as usual!!
I do like the effect of the different colors taken from the panel though. For some reason the greens aren't looking as nice as they do in person,
So I decided I would add very narrow strips of the darker green between the blocks. Shown here are much wider strips than there will be. Just have to figure out what to do with the corners. Hopefully my arithmetic skills will improve tomorrow. Having a pencil and paper handy will help I think!
My current plan is then to add at least one more of the darker green borders and I am toying with adding some sort of black border as well.
Finished all the outside blocks today and it did take some time. Here they are all done and situated.
Here I tested the adding of the green strips between the blocks but even at 1/2 inch, they are too wide so will have to undo a bit. I knew the measurement had to be less than 1/2 finished but now I am thinking it will only be 1/4 of an inch. Then I will surround them with another strip of the green and then think about what to do next (if anything). Good to be creative again even though my arithmetic skills are being challenged!
Almost finished here and you will notice no green between the tiles. I must have made my seams to small or something but just no room for the green inserts which is okay as this is the way I originally envisioned it.
And here is the top completed (and even a little sunshine this afternoon). I will quilt it and I think I will finish it with a flange binding with a little yellow and black as the main color. Of course that means I will be machine binding it unless I can figure out how to do with hand binding.
This is truly a miscellaneous blog with bits of what I have done during the past month. This is a late afternoon picture looking over the Cape Fear River with lots of color in the sky.
My biggest accompishment has been the basting, machine quilting and binding of 18 quilts! 9 of those were for the Neonatal unit at our local hospital, 3 are for Habitat for Humanity and the rest will go to the Sweet Charity group except for one which I will send to a cousin.
My oldest daughter and I made our annual pilgrimage to Huntington Beach State Park down in S. Carolina but we were a little late this year and there were a lot of people as it was the weekend. We didn't see too many birds but did spot our Wood Storks all off in a tree This was a nice Great Egret and there were many of those.
We also spotted several Semi-palmated Plovers.
They were joined by several Semi-palmated Sandpipers.
I took a drive around Greenfield Lake here in Wilmington a couple of weeks ago and the leaves are just beginning to turn there.
A very late afternoon trip down to the Air Force housing produced quite a herd of deer who didn't seem to care that they had visitors!
I also added to the quilts I had made this summer with these two baby quilts made from fabrics I had previously cut up.
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I have had this piece of Michael Miller fabric for years. There were two yards and a total of 3 repeats in the length. I have stared at it the last couple of years wondering what to do with it and finally decided to do a stack and whack even though I didn't have the repeats lengthwise. There was a partial repeat across the fabric so I used that and decided to do a "posy" stack and whack .
I finally decided to use a full panel and surround it with the posies so that I would get to see the full panel which I really liked a lot -- the reason I couldn't just give this fabric away. My plan at present is to surround the panel with a two inch green border and then surround the posies with varying shades of green and yellow. Looking at the picture now, I am thinking some white might make its way in somewhere.. Currently the panel is 24 inches high and 26 inches wide and each of the little posies is 5 1/2 inches. I will be using my hand dyed "solids" for the borders. I may rearrange the posy blocks a bit as well. We shall see how it develops. My quilts generally tell me what to do not the reverse!
On the bottom is the green I am thinking will be a good border.
These three fabrics will surround the little posies (I think!). They look better in person.
It's been a very busy couple of weeks basting, machine quilting and binding all those quilt tops I did last summer. I have made major progress and have 3 Habitat for Humanity quilts finished, 8 neo-natal quilts and 1 Sweet Charity quilt in the past 10 days. I also have 5 more quilts spray basted and have actually run out of basting spray yet again!! All I have left to baste now are the two big quilts that I am keeping. Only one of those has be done by year end (the mystery quilt).
There was a plethora of baby quilts at our October meeting. This is an amazingly productive group!!! I am only going to post some of them.
Our speaker was our own Ruth Humphrey who had an amazing display of over 25 quilts -- stunning work!! I have included some of my favorites although I took pictures of most of them.
The quilt peaking through on the right was my contribution for this month. I will have at least 7 to turn in this coming meeting!!
This is our speaker Ruth in her colorful vest. I have only posted a few of the quilts she showed. She is a quilter after my own heart as she does scrappy almost exclusively. Even my very first quilt was a scrap quilt, before I had even heard the term!
I had several days when I couldn't upload pictures to Blogger so this is really late!!
I didn't post any of the show and tell pictures as I couldn't get any good pictures because of where people were standing. Hopefully I will pick a better seat next time!! There were many nice ones!
