Playing in My Studio: Combining Multiple Techniques

Posted on May 30, 2014August 15, 2014 by Betty Jo's Blog / Posted in A Little How-To, Art Quilt Techniques, Design Work, Embroidery, Food for Thought, High-Tech Studio, Techniques, Uncategorized / 1 Comment

I really love taking the different techniques I have managed to gather over the decades and apply them to make an art quilt, a decorated vest, or a beautiful bag. Since my retirement a couple of years ago I have spent a lot of my time learning and perfecting new and old techniques with the goal of being able to call on anything to produce the look I want. In my quilt “Waiting…”, for instance, I used drawing, paper piecing, regular piecing, applique, trapunto, fabric painting, digital art printed fabrics, thread painting, free motion quilting, and embellishment.

Waiting…

So whether you are a traditional, contemporary, art, or modern quilter, I encourage you to gather your techniques and tools and put them all together to realize your own masterpieces. It’s really fun to not be limited by not knowing how to do some technique and you can end up with some delightful items while you learn. While it’s always nice to have a face-to-face class with an expert, one of the nice things today is there are many sources for learning these techniques online, sometimes with accompanying books.

First of all, If you haven’t already, I suggest you spend the modest amount of money to buy a membership on The Quilt Show and watch the shows, the classes, and the videos that accompany the BOM (Block of the Month) even if you are not making the BOMS. This has been a big resource for me in improving my quilt making, learning about who are the major quilters in the world today, and being inspired when I get discouraged.

Secondly, I discovered that Nancy Zieman has many of her Sewing With Nancy available free to watch on Wisconsin Public Television online website, many of which relate to quilting, but in fact, most any kind of sewing relates to quilting. Also, you can purchase her dvds with accompanying books from Nancy’s Notions.

Sharon Schamber has dvds available now on some of her techniques from her daughter’s website that she used to have on a downloadable website. I subscribed to that website that is now defunct, and downloaded and watched everything available, even the long arm ones. I fortunately still have them. Some of the videos seem a little primitive in format, but her techniques are wonderful. I particularly recommend The Quilt Fairy, which shows a painting method that has stood me in good stead for many places on my show quilts. Now that brings up another point. Fabric painting has different styles and materials just like applique or piecing, and each one has its place and learning as many of them as you can is helpful. On “Waiting…” I used Sharon Schamber’s method presented in The Quilt Fairy to put the lowlights and highlights in the woman’s dress and cape. I used my own computerized digital painting to paint her face and hands and printed them on fabric and appliqued them. I used watered down Setacolor fabric paints to wash paint the sky fabric as demonstrated by Mickey Lawler show number 1305 on The Quilt Show. Her hair is thread painted, which is another key technique especially useful for art quilts. While I developed my own technique for this, it closely matches that shown by Nancy Prince on show number 1004 on TQS.

Wind-tossed woman showing the high and lowlights on her clothing, her digitally painted face and hands, her thread painted hair, and a little embellishment.

The clipper ship has wool batting between the sails and the quilt. Together with the dual bats (one 80/20 and one wool) I used in the quilt itself, this provided a wind look behind the sails.

If you are going to be at AQS Charlotte in July, my quilt “Waiting…” will be in the show and you can go see it for yourself. It may not place. I have had it in two shows so far and it did not. One judge at Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival thought my borders were too large. Another judge at HMQS really didn’t like it. She didn’t like my color choices, my overall design impact, and my quilting. But hey, to each his own, right? I would make it in the same colors today even after that critique, and I happen to like what I call “organic” quilting for a story landscape quilt like this. The winners for that show are magnificent quilts, I will say. Nevertheless, I am honored to have my quilt show in the big shows even without a ribbon.

I want to show you one other quilt, because it has a heavy dose of in-the-hoop machine embroidery, which isn’t used in Waiting…, that I digitized myself and also motifs I used from my Bernina software that I enlarged and painted after it was quilted.

The Storyteller…now touring with Hoffman Challenge 2013 show

The phoenix and dragon in front of the sun is the story she is writing. The word on her tablet is “Betty” in Japanese Katakana. I drew and painted her on my computer myself, printed her on fabric and appliqued her down. After that I added some highlights with real paint. Then I drew and digitized the tree trunk myself from scratch. It was a bear to stitch. I stitched it out twice on a piece of brown fabric. It required two hoopings on my jumbo hoop on my Bernina 830 LE, and then I turned the edge of the brown fabric behind the stitching and appliqued it to the quilt. Even though the tree trunk was tough to do, I like it so much I am planning on using this kind of tree trunk in a deep dark forest quilt that I am planning, which will have a beam of light making it through the trees to a color-filled spot on the forest (perhaps the ruin of a beautiful little church with the light shining through the stained glass window to the floor of the forest where flowers are blooming. It’s been in my head for a long time now.

I am telling you all of this because I am thinking of writing a book about some or all of these techniques. I am working on a book proposal now, but I can’t share much about this with you because of the publisher rules, who understandably does not want things published before the book gets published. I have temporarily put aside the Bernina book because I understand that many of my frustrations have been dealt with in the latest v7 software upgrade, but I need to obtain this product before I can see for sure.

Sew happy everyone! And pull those techniques together–even hand quilting and embroidery–to realize your dream quilts.

On Managing Stashes for Busy Sewists

Posted on May 5, 2014July 11, 2014 by Betty Jo's Blog / Posted in A Little How-To, Fabrics, Food for Thought, My Studio, Threads, Tools, Uncategorized

I hear a lot of embarrassment out there from my sewing friends about the size of their stashes, but I say don’t be embarrassed, but be grateful and manage those stashed right into productivity. It just needs a realization that there is a huge value to having well-stocked stashes collected over time and properly managed. I began this practice decades ago when I first used sewing as a supplemental income when my children were very small and improved it substantially since retiring a couple of years ago.

Since retiring and reorganizing my stashes I have found the value of spending just a little time each week making sure things are put where they belong and taking note of what needs replacing. Now don’t get me wrong. I am not very good at this. Instead of carefully ironing and folding my fabrics and organizing them carefully on shelves, as some of you do, I sort of fold them straight from the dryer, and then stuff them into my generically labeled drawers. I just dump my threads in similar plastic bins according to type. Libby Lehman, bless her dear heart, had a magnificently organized studio, properly labeled (I would guess it sits there waiting for her full recovery still in its organized splendor). She was my inspiration, but I will never reach her level of organization. Still, she helped me see that at least SOME organization is needed. I’m sure some of you would be horrified if you saw what I considered “organized”…LOL

Imagine that you have a great idea, found that perfect pattern, or have designed a special project in Electric Quilt whatever version and want to get going on it. In your dreamworld, you go into your studio, select your fabrics from your impeccably organized stash, and get started. Then you pull the perfect threads out of your thread stash just right for your project. Your small amount of time is well spent and you make significant progress on your project in that little bit of time. Now I know it is fun to go shopping in your local quilt shop, but my time and budget is limited even since I retired, so I needed to develop a list of what I needed for several projects ahead. Since retiring to full-time fabric artist, I have had to organize my projects, deadlines, show quilt schedules. It saves me far more time than it cost to set this up initially and keep it going. I use simple computerized spreadsheets and it seems to work. I also put deadlines on my computer calendar so it reminds me when I need to do something to help counter that vanishing-time problem. 🙂

What kinds of stashes do you have? I have several types of stashes–quilting cottons, various types of silks, light woolens, denims, etc. in the fabrics sections. But my thread stashes have significantly grown since I retired. My favorite threads are #30 and #40 polyester solids and variegated embroidery threads, #100 silk threads, #12 and #16 perle cotton threads, and #8 perle cottons and Razzle Dazzle and other decorative bobbin and hand embroidery threads, and hand quilting threads that I use for hand sewing beads onto my creations. I also have a collection of buttons, beads, sequins, fabric paints and markers, brushes, stabilizers, interfacing, bag making specialty parts, and needles of all descriptions. I also have a very nice collection of tools. I did not collect these all at once, but over the course of many decades and some of these items are inherited and older than me.

In the past few years I have given away a large amount of fabrics for clothing that I know I will never make. I had decided I need to give away a lot out of my quilting fabrics stash because they no longer appeal to my tastes (funny how that happens), but instead I decided to design several very quick to make quilts that are still pretty, and take those fabrics and make them into pre-cut kits, using my die cutter, that I will either sew up myself or convince some of my friends to sew for people in need. We’ll see if this works or not. I’ve only just started this.

My ultimate goal is to reach a point where the fabrics in my stash are the ones I will use so my stuffed full drawers will once again resemble a nicely organized stash, that I have the stabilizers, battings, beads, buttons, and threads I need most of the time and don’t have to delay a project to order them (my “local” quilt shop is 45 minutes away, and the brands I like are not often available, so I buy my threads online).

Sew I have learned that a small part of my in-the-studio time has to go to managing my projects and stashes in order to keep more productive and the costs spread out across time (as you know threads and fabrics are so expensive…it just helps to have built a stash and keep it stocked so I don’t have to spend a big amount at the beginning of each project), and my fabric art humming along. I realize a lot of you are far better organized than me, but I encourage you if you haven’t done so to take a look at your own stashes and projects and do a little managing and organizing and your productivity and imagination may just take off and soar in ways you don’t expect. And you’ll probably save a little money too.

Sew happy everyone!

A Fresh Start

Posted on April 30, 2014April 30, 2014 by Betty Jo's Blog / Posted in Food for Thought, Uncategorized / 1 Comment

Well here we are with a whole new blog.

I am still struggling a bit with the new blog software. There is a lot to learn to provide a nice looking, easy to read, and easy to operate blog. Nevertheless, I am glad to get this up and running. I will tell you that it was most definitely NOT my choice to change. Indeed, it was a bit of a blow to my time space continuum management plans. 😀 But I do appreciate the fact that GoDaddy gave me adequate warning and have been very helpful in getting this done so far. Truly, I understand the need sometimes for a company to make some changes to improve their bottom line, but when they do, I just hope it doesn’t impact mine. 🙂

I have decided that beginning next week I will bring in one of my older posts from the other blog every Thursday for a while. It has taken me some effort to archive it all, including the pictures. In the process of archiving everything, I found several series on making specific quilts and a few independent posts that I think may be kind of fun for our throwback Thursday “From the Archive” posts. If you remember a specific post you liked to reference and have a request, please let me know and I will post it.

Sew let us begin anew. Actually it feels kind of nice to have a bold new start. If you have any requests for topics to cover, suggested ideas for this new blog, or other comments toward improvement, please add a comment. I read all the comments I get and try to answer them in a timely fashion

Coincidentally…or perhaps not…I have also restarted my little Jacobean-like folkish birds-in-a-tree silk quilt. I was unhappy with the silk dupioni I was originally using and so I have changed to a lovely darker red dupioni that my test indicates will not run or fade and is soooo much prettier. As soon as I get this up and running I am going to re-embroider the central big vine and leaves in black, and rework the thin vines with bobbin work using number 8 perle cotton.

Sew happy everyone! Let the fun begin on this new playground!