Angela style quilting

Angela Walters has her own style of quilting and every once in awhile it’s good to watch her videos to buff up on her techniques. She does a lot of swirls and echos and her quilting is beautifully done. She’s been having a quilt along this month so I’ve been getting her videos sent to my email but she has lots on you tube that you can go anytime to check out. I like to put her on my iPad sometimes and practice.

Yesterday I used this gorgeous pine cone fabric to make a small quilt for a journal cover and quilted it “Angela style”. 

The thread matches so you can’t see the front but here is the back. Not great but then because the thread hides the quilting you don’t notice. Good practice but I did learn that when the thread matches so well it’s hard to quilt since it’s hard to see what you’ve done and where you’ve been. That’s why my quilting isn’t very good. (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it). What is that tan piece of fabric doing there you ask? There was a scrap under the quilt sandwhich when I was putting it together using the sew and flip method and it got sewn in. You’ve never done that have you. Luckily for a journal cover you don’t see the back, which is why I don’t even use a backing so I simply cut it off and left it. No problem.

Here is a really good video that shows just quilting and shows what a master Angela is at just making different designs flow into each other.

Enjoy!

Let it be

First let me get on my soapbox and say how appalling it is how humans are destroying the land therefore destroying the wildlife. Why do we have to chop down trees and bushes. Why build all the huge houses I see all over the place. Every year I see forests and fields cut down. 

Why can’t we just

They took all the trees
And put them in a tree museum
And they charged all the people
A dollar and a half to see 'em
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
'Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And they put up a parking lot

Joni Mitchell

Collaboration quilt finish

Look at last weeks post for the details but basically the message here is that we are all halves of our family members through time and that makes us all unique. I had lots of fun embellishing all the figures to make them all different.

And different they are!

Remind you of ant family members? If so, God help you! Lol!

Collaboration quilts

I joined a small online group that is doing a project. It goes like this. We each make a small art quilt depicting the word half in any way we wish. The person that started the group sent us all a package of fabric to use. We make our quilt but don’t finish it because we then send to another member who works on it some more, adding her own twist to the theme. Basically each quilt will be made by two people each with ideas and talents of their own adding to the final piece. It then gets sent back to the originator who gave us the fabric and she will mount and display somewhere.

This is what I came up with - my first thought was half moon although this looks more like a planet so I call it view from the planer cirbaf. Note the Star Trek words quilted on it. I’ll be very interested to see what my partner comes up with.

This is what I got this week from the person I’m doing the second half with. Her idea is that she is half her mother, half her father, who is half of their mother and father and so on. She stamped all those cool looking figures on , of course half of the piece. 

It definitely has a circular feel to it so paying homage to the circle of life, I quilted concentric circles. I then cut it into a circle and am doing the binding now. I did not use bias binding (pain in the ______ ) so I hope it will work by just clipping the corners. So far it seems fine. 

Next I plan to add something different to each figure since all those halves is what makes us all unique. That will be really fun. I’ll show you the finish next week.

I also spent a lot of last week putting my IKEA drawer set together. Not an easy task but worth it. 9 drawers for storing and organizing fabric and “stuff”.

It’s called the Alex http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/50192822/

 I love it!

You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist

While this quilt is relevant to today’s turmoil in our country, this quote from Indira Ghandhi is what came to my mind when thinking of a quilt for a show at a local bird sanctuary. They have an art show every year and the theme this year is the migratory bird treaty act of 1918. Basically this treaty brought countries together to agree not to kill off all the birds that migrate to their country from another. 

At the turn of the 19th century in the U.S. and Europe, it became wildly popular—and that’s an understatement—for ladies to wear feathers and whole taxidermied birds on their hats. One ornithologist reported two walks in Manhattan in 1886 and counting 700 hats, 525 of which were topped by feathers or birds. Can you imagine walking around with dead birds on your head! This is one of the reasons a lot of birds were massacred back in the day causing some to become extinct and others to come close. Which is why the migratory bird treaty was so important. 

Thank God our forefathers (and mother’s) thought enough of our environment to put this plan in place. Now if we could just change our current evil ways, the planet would be a much better place.

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