Road to No-Man's Land

Our Fast Friday Fabric Challenge required that we manipulate our fabric in some way and that the subject be a landscape. I had never tried a desert scene before. I started by pleating the sky. In order to prevent top-heaviness, I used trapunto on the mountains to flesh them out a bit. I tried ruching for the first time in the bush in the lower left corner. I also used some greenery from Hobby Lobby to balance out the texture in the total picture. When I first started, I thought this was going to be so ugly, but now that it's done, I'm happy with the coloring. My son and daughter-in-law have an empty spot over their love seat after they remodeled their living room, so I'm going to give this quilt to them, if they want it.

The first of the month I made a sunshine quilt to donate through our quilt guild. It's the water scene with fish, turtles, etc. It's not very artistic, but it's very colorful. I hope some little kid will like it. Our guild has donated over 4,000 sunshine quilts to hospitals, police, and social workers to give to kids who are undergoing stressful times.
Yesterday morning at 6:30 a.m. I finished the quilt I've been working on for 3 weeks entitled "Flight in Shimmering Moonlight". Our Fast Friday Fabric Challenge was to create a quilt that had wings somewhere in the quilt. It had to have 3 main colors: mine are aquas, purples and golds plus black and white, and it had to be fractured. I added a piece of sheer crystalette fabric across the quilt to represent the moonlight. That's my fracture, besides all the fractures of the mountain landscape. I tried a new fusing powder the attach the bird, the moon, and the flowers. It worked quite well, except that the powder crystals get all over and are sometimes hard to remove. I used these same fusing powders to mend my husband's work sweatshirt. We'll see how they hold up under duress. I also used textile paints to add a shadow to the backside of the white mountain, and I added one star (a crystal) above the mountain in memory of my Mom, who would have thought this quilt was so beautiful.

Flight in Shimmering Moonlight

Happy Holidays Quilt

I chose Italian Tomatoes as my color scheme inspiration. My color scheme is red, green and white with metallic gold accents. On December 26, we had received 20 inches of new snow. I went out to take pictures. I brought along the Christmas wreath and placed it in the picture of our barn. My husband had leaned some gates up against the barn and with the snow piled on them, it made a pleasing still life arrangement. I printed the photo out onto fabric using my InkJet printer, added some Christmas trim, used my machine to print the Happy Holidays and fussy cut out some holly to use as accents around the printing. I then thread painted the photo using a combination of machine quilting, metallic threads, and hand quilting. The tiny stitches of the pine needles took forever, as did sewing on all the beads that represent the red berries.I thank Rhoda for the fun challenge. Ads really are excellent places to look for inspiring color schemes. Your comments are welcome.

B3 Niacin Crystals

I finally finished B3 Niacin Crystals. Since my mom died on Thanksgiving day, I haven't done any quilting. I started this quilt this morning (Dec.24) and finished it at 3 p.m. this afternoon, so even tho I'm late in posting the photos, I did do the quilt in just 6 hours. The quilt measures 9" x 11". I used thread painting and fabric glitter markers. The photo is based on the electron micrograph of B3 crystals by Dennis Kunkle of Microscopy, Inc. I downloaded the picture of the niacin bottle from the Internet and printed it onto fabric, then enhanced it with thread painting. This was a fun little quilt to do and I felt good to get back into quilting again. Everyone has done such a wonderful job with this challenge.

Baby Seal

I created this seal for the Fast Friday Fabric Challenge. Criteria for the Challenge:
1. Subject must be an animal
2. Try to use trapunto and reverse applique
My challenge meets all the criteria. I started with a piece of gray sky fabric that I thought looked somewhat like floating icebergs rather than clouds. I used a photo of a baby seal to draw my pattern. I traced the pattern onto the gray fabric and placed a piece of cotton batting underneath. I stitched around the shape of the seal, trimmed away the gray fabric, leaving the batting showing. I then stitched around the shape one more time with a zigzag applique stitch. I appliqued two black eyes, a mouth, and a nose, painted in some gray shading with textile paints. I then placed in another piece of batting the size of the finished quilt and added the backing fabric. I stitched around the shape of the seal again to hold all the layers together leaving a 4 inch space open to allow stuffing for the trapunto. I then used fiberfill to plump out the shape of the seal. I closed up the opening and began shaping the body with machine quilting. I used black French knots for the whisker and eyebrow bases and then used black machine stitching for the whiskers. I combined blue and white Angelina fibers and fused them together. I place them in a semicircle around the seal's body for the appearance of water. I machine quilted in semicircles to look like water ripples. Since I had used red Minkee for the backing fabric, I discovered that even though I was quilting with white thread, the machine quilting brought the red fibers to the forefront. I was not happy with this outcome, but it is done, and it will have to stay that way. Just one more learning experience in the long road to become a quilter. I also wish there was some way to make the flippers look more realistic. Any suggestions?