Category: Art Quilts

Reverse Applique: A Weekend Sampler

I think one big secret to any successful art quilt design is making samples. A sample is a helpful way to “audition” a technique on a micro-level before taking the plunge into the art quilt itself. So, this past Saturday I made a small sample using sheer fabrics and reverse applique. I learned both techniques from Libby Lehman, who is a very gifted artist and teacher, and I encourage anyone who reads this to look into her work.

Before starting my project I first had to make some scones, though: a weekend morning is all about carbs and coffee. There are lots of scone recipes online; this one is pretty good, though I substituted plain yogurt for vanilla yogurt and added a bit more sugar, and I used half spelt flour, and I baked the scones on parchment. But this recipe gives you the proportions. Here are the scones,  just egg-washed:

While I was winding my bobbins I let them over-bake, but they turned out really good:

Thus armed, I started my sample.

In my current project, I have a “design motif” of a flower-shape based on desert verbena. I want to repeat this design motif multiple times in my piece; this is generally a good design principle, at least for me. Using sheer fabric to add a thin, nearly transparent applique is one way; using reverse applique is another way: both of these techniques add very little heft to the quilt top itself.

In both reverse applique and sewing sheer fabrics onto a quilt top, you need a background fabric, which in this case is yellow hand-dyed cotton sateen and is about the size of a fat-eighth; on top of the yellow fabric is a layer of pink polyester tulle, which I’d painted to get that color, if you look at the bottom left corner you can see the 2 fabrics:

Flipped over, you can see I’ve attached some stabilizer scraps with spray-adhesive. The stabilizer is a cotton-pulp fiber that I got on a giant roll from a company in Minnesota; it works well with my machine– you have to experiment with your machine to figure out which stabilizer works best.

So, to get started, I now have the following fabric sandwich: background fabric, tulle on the top and stabilizer on the back:

Below on the left is a pattern for a large verbena flower; I drew the design on the stabilizer part of the fabric sandwich:

Then I sewed over the drawn line with straight-stitch (use a small stitch) along the drawn line. I then reinforced with another line of stitch to make sure it was nice and strong, this is what it looks like on the back….

…and the front…

I then pulled off all the stabilizer from the back, then gently snipped away all the unnecessary tulle on the front, and all that was left was this nice flower held in place with 2 rows of straight-stitch:

So. Now I want to actually start the reverse-applique; I have one layer, now on to the second layer. I draw an outline of the same shape, just smaller:

I then pick the fabric for this flower, a fuschia I dyed, and I used spray adhesive to attach the stabilizer to the wrong side of the fabric; the fuschia fabric is then placed under the yellow fabric, so that the new small flower shape is directly over the fuschia fabric underneath:

Because I use an older machine, I have to unscrew the presser foot in order to fit my embroidery hoop under the needle; then I reattached the presser foot.

The new fabric sandwich–yellow fabric on top, fushia fabric with stabilizer underneath– is then slid into the embroidery hoop, and again straight stitch is used (small stitch) to stitch over the drawn flower shape.

Once sewn, the new, smaller verbena looks like this:

I carefully used snips and cut away the top yellow fabric to reveal the fuschia underneath; at this point I realized I needed to use reverse applique again to make the small pink center for the flower, so I did that in a pinch, using the same techiques described above: now, I have 3 layers: tulle flower, reverse applique flower and reverse applique flower center. Cool!

The whole piece then goes back in the embroidery hoop and I used satin stitch over the raw edges of the flower. It looks OK; my foot pedal had a small short in it which just got worse as I sewed, to a point where I could only get the machine to sew if I used the ball of my foot: an ergonomic nightmare.  So it’s not the best satin stitch;  I didn’t bother trying to finish the center.

So, the general idea is to use the above technique on my big project; here’s an idea of where some of the shapes might be placed:

But my sewing machine is in the shop now, as of this morning: oh well. Looks like I’ll be working on fiddle tunes the next few days…

Irish Music en route to Tucson….

Last year I met David and Roz when they came to Tucson from where they live in Kilshanny, County Clare, to visit their family here.  At that time, I’d just been playing the fiddle for 6 months after a nearly…..7 year break. I’d quit for 7 years because there just was no Irish music scene in Tucson–nothing worth my time– and I didn’t see any point in playing; it’s a social music, after all, and you can’t play it in a void.

Anyway. David knows any awful lot about Irish music; hell, he lives in County Clare. They’re coming back to visit Tucson later this week. No doubt we’ll have some good tunes.  Last time he was here w/Roz I gave them a small bit of fabric “art” that Roz liked; it’s not an original design of mine, it was a project I’d started in a class in 2005 taught by Velda Newman, who is famous for her quilted fruits, vegetables, flowers and fish, among other things.

Here is a photo from David and Roz’s Kilshanny kitchen, featuring the little quilted cantalope I gave them last year:

I was very honored that they liked this enough to hang up in their kitchen. Kitchens after all are very important places; the most important part of a house!  Can’t wait to make it back to Clare one day…

Work Week in Review

Aside from dithering about my cloud fabric dilemma described in the last post, after work this week I managed to dye some yarn I got from Dharma Trading. It’s a very yummy silk/cotton blend and here’s the hank, fresh out of the box:

Only once, long ago,  did I jump into a hank before winding it into a ball….with very sad, tangled consequences. So on one recent weeknight in my neighborhood, this is what my viewing of the Daily Show looked like:

I love my yarn-ball-winder-thingy: it makes very neat and tidy balls of yarn. My hank was transformed into something I could actually use, rather than just tangle up.

That interview on w/Jon Stewart was great, BTW, w/Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari, who was jailed, beaten and tortured in Iran due to his appearance on the Daily Show, when the program taped in Iran earlier this year.  I like to do something while watching TV; the very passive act of watching TV is highly problematic for me, which of course makes me a definite minority.

The next day after work I dyed my yarn and rinsed it in the kitchen sink: here are the finished colors:

Now comes the weekend….so much exciting fabric and yarn! Spoken like only a true fiber geek.

Flour Resist: For Surface Design, It’s Irresistable!

OK, I apologize for that bad pun.

After several days of either staring at the TV or holed up in my bedroom with only a chugging steam vaporizer and damp magazines for company, I pulled out the fabric and set off to make some cloud-themed fabric for my new art quilt.

Flour resist is a great, cheap way to get excellent results when it comes to designing fabric. I love it. I first read about it in the February/March 2008 issue of Quilting Arts magazine, and then again in more depth in a fantastic book by Jane Dunnewold, “Improvisational Screen Printing”, which I got myself for Christmas last year. I think I like this technique because it’s quick. Sometimes I get tired of the idea that art has to take forever!

I painted a mix of one part white flour, one part water onto cloud shapes I drew onto fabric:

If you don’t pin down the fabric at the time you apply the flour paste, the fabric scrunches up like this:

However, this didn’t bother me because I wanted an uneven, scrunchy surface, because that would make the dye pool in unpredictable ways when I applied it:

Technically, I think you’re “supposed” to apply paint or at least thickened dye…..because of course the more wet the pigment, the quicker the flour resist will break down. I think though that if you want an impressionistic design, or if you’re theme is organic–like plants, sea, sky–some unpredictable breakdown could be really attractive.

Here’s what it looked like the first time around; because, of course, I knew I’d have to over-dye it a few times to get the result I wanted:

So, I did the whole thing over again, applying paste and then squirting on dye with an eyedropper and letting it set in the warm sun for an hour….

After the second time around, this is what the clouds looked like:

The weather kind of took  a nose dive, and I wanted a bit more distinction in my cloud shapes, so for the third time I stapled the fabric down to keep it even, painted on the resist, and carefully sponged on dye, this time in my dining room with a lot of drop-cloth fabric on the floor and heater on to make sure it was nice and warm for the dye to set:

This is the finished piece; it’ll be the top bit of the quilt:

I’m piecing together all the screen-printed and dyed fabric today that will be the “quilt top”; and from that point on, the reverse-applique and applique will begin!

My New Art Quilt: progress takes forever!

During my workweek I managed to do a little bit here and there on my new project.  Here’s some fabric I dyed–yellows and oranges for poppies:

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Here’s what some of  it looked like once I put it in the washer and let it dry and pressed it all:

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I made some basic patterns of poppies and then made appliques from those patterns. The thing about desert poppies is that they don’t have a lot of really in-your-face pistil and stamen action going on; the shapes are quite simple. One applique is complete; the other is in-progress.

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I’m going to use sheer fabrics and make shapes from tulle and organza for my new quilt. I’m just not sure if I’ll make the appliques separately and stitch them on the pieced quilt top. There’s another way to do it (well, there’s probably multiple ways to do it)….here’s a sheer-applique under construction:

sheer poppy

Here’s the finished poppy, sans any stem or leaves. It looks OK for a sample. But that’s why it’s a sample….I’m pretty sure I can make it look better….next time!

sheer poppy 2

My New Art Quilt: Sonoran Desert Wildflowers

I started this art quilt project  late last spring. Right after I started, my uncle was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer; he lived for 2 months after that, and I spent my free time visiting him until he died. Only recently have I picked up where I left off. I have this idea of a big brightly colored art quilt with pink sand verbena and yellow and orange desert poppies and a bright blue sky with cirrus clouds. That’s the general plan and color scheme. Overall size will be something like 70″ x 40″.

Here’s some sand verbena from my wildflower perennial bed:

sand verbena resized

 

I cut verbena shapes out of contact paper, based on the photo; contact paper is the stuff you use for shelving in your cabinets.

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Here are my plywood boards w/poly fleece stapled on top; I took these outside and stapled my fabric on top….

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I peeled off the adhesive on my verbena-shapes and stuck them on the fabric stapled on the boards, then screen printed thickened dye on the fabric….then I washed the fabric and did it all over again a few times.

You can see some of the finished verbena-fabric here on my “design wall”–just fancy talk for a big fabric covered bulletin board where I can hang fabric up to “audition” for whatever project I’m working on:

screen printed fabric

Now the question is what to do with all the fabric! Time for some sewing experiments…..

Traditional Irish Music Session in Tucson!

There are no bells and whistles with this post; no photos or MP3 uploads….yet. Next time. You’ll just have to believe me when I say today we had a super traditional Irish music session here in Tucson; it was a house session; and like in ye olden days, the kitchen table was moved aside to make room for a circle of musicians. We had:  one flute, two fiddles, one bodhran, one lovely voice for song, one guitar, one mandolin, and one set of amazingly in tune uilleann pipes (no small feat for this climate).  In addition to the usual war-horse tunes played at sessions (what I think of as the “global Irish repertoire”) we had some great tunes by the likes of Paddy Fahy and Sean Ryan that are less commonly heard, at least around here. All in all the sound was great and the craic even greater. Well done everyone!

The next house session is set for Sunday November 15th. I’ll report more then.