Canterbury Knight in AQS Syracuse with Ribbon and my friend Libby
This has been a rather emotional week. First of all, as many of you already know, my little quilt Canterbury Knight won a second place ribbon in its category at AQS Syracuse. On Friday, a very long time friend of mine Libby Hedrick in Ithaca, NY, pictured above with my quilt sporting its ribbon, went to the show and took bunches of pictures of the show and my quilt in place. She and her husband are musicians and we used to sew together and went to the same church and even performed music together when I lived in Ithaca, NY as a young wife and mother so long ago. We have been friends all these decades despite not seeing each other very often after Marvin and me and the kids left Ithaca for Washington, DC. What a sweet delight for me filled with memories and fun.
In fact, so many of my friends have been encouraging me, inspiring me, and helping me move my quilting art forward, and it seems to have been especially so this week. I am excited about the future. Yes, the future…I moved into quilting when I was in my late fifties from a clothes sewer and even fashion designer and I am 69. One of my role models is “Grandma Moses” of the art quilting world, though my style of art is different. I did get a running start on her…she started serious painting when she was 78!
From Wikipedia: “Anna Mary Robertson Moses (September 7, 1860 – December 13, 1961), known by her nickname Grandma Moses, was a renowned American folk artist. Having begun painting in earnest at the age of 78, she is often cited as an example of an individual successfully beginning a career in the arts at an advanced age. Her works have been shown and sold in the United States and abroad and have been marketed on greeting cards and other merchandise. Moses’ paintings are among the collections of many museums. The Sugaring Off was sold for US$1.2 million in 2006.”
Sew now we’ve established that I am planning on a lot more quilting and that my Spiral Galaxy quilt is finished, I have been working on digitizing elements for my oldest son Ken’s quilt design he gave me for inclusion in my Ancient Manuscripts series in my Bernina V7 software. It is a fabulous design, related to the knights of the round table. The Celtic design border is the most problematic to make. I’ve pretty much figured everything else out, except how to make swords look sharp and pointed in fabric.
Sew even though I am not going to share with you the entire design until later..maybe even after its debut…I will share parts of it here and there. Right now I am working on border elements. Here’s the upper left corner design. I think he brought it in from a Dover publication and the original artist likely drew it in the 11th or 12th century. So it needs a little cleaning up. Here’s the design:
Upper left corner (7″ block)…will be stitched in gold thread on a dark green background.
I’ve already digitized a few designs and am about to go and do a stitchout. Here’s the image of the lower left corner (7″ block)
lower left corner
And here’s image of the smaller right corners (both the same)
smaller right corner blocks
The bears in the border are the long designs that run the length of the borders between the blocks. I’ll let you know how I solve this. I may end up painting some of the designs after stitching with gold paint. I just have to work these things out one item at a time for this wonderful design and, like I suggested in a recent post, it is important to test these things along the way.
Sew happy everyone! Thank you for your wonderful support and encouragement. It means a lot.
I must be too literal as I don’t see the connection between your drawing and your digitizing. I do like your digitized designs and can imagine the challenge it would be to get the over/under parts just right! What a special friend you have! How sweet of her to promote your work and be so excited about your ribbon. (I’m excited about your ribbon too!)
Hi Terry, Thanks! As for the connection between the drawing and the digitizing, that is kind of a complex answer. Not in every case, but in these border elements I am starting from a full-sized drawing that my son Ken put together from Dover publications, who likely got their Celtic designs from the originals of the 11th and 12th centuries. So the drawings are often not cleaned up by Dover. In order for me to make a good digital design, I have to start with a clean drawing very close to what I want the stitch out to look like, because in this case I convert them to vector drawings and then ask the software to auto digitize them. Once that happens, I go in and do further editing of the digitized design as needed. In other cases, I will use a drawing I did or from another copyright free source and just have it as a background while I actually draw the embroidery design myself. I decide which to do by the complexity of the color and the number of thread color changes, or if I just want to use a small part of a larger drawing. I do a lot of my own drawings now that I start with Corel Painter 16 or on paper and scan in, and just draw it. Then I move it into Bernina v7 software if I’m going to trace it into an embroidery design. Or I move it into Corel Draw (which is what Bernina v7 uses for its underlying drawing package) to convert it and clean it up beforehand if I’m going to autodigitize it. I should probably do a blog post about this. 😀
All of your stitch-outs look wonderful! Can’t wait to see the little snippets along the way and the final piece when you get it finished.
Thanks Nancy! This project does seem to have a lot of difficult parts to it. 🙂