Friday, April 18, 2008

No Pressure On This One! Yeah Right!!!

This is a landscape quilt that is a group effort. I was asked to be the quilter and also was asked to do some thread painting on it. The two trees were merely fabric trunks with no branches when I was given this project to work on. After a couple of trial pieces I finally figured out how to make the branches and leaves on the tree on the right. This was done on my Phaff with an embroider hoop free motion embroidery. I had to put stabilizer behind the applique as well which had to be trimmed after I was finished. I am pretty pleased with the way the trees came out and defiantly see more trees in my future.


So now onto the quilting! A sky can be a daunting thing to quilt as any of you that have ever attempted it well know. I wanted to create lines but also give the feeling of "sky". Before I even began I spent over an hour looking at photos of landscape quilts on the Internet to see how other people did skys. Well I never found one that really said sky to me so I finally just started drawing on paper and came up with this. Then I drew it with the machine in metallic thread. I was really worried I would not get the metallic thread to play nice but after calling my friend Judy and asking her how she did hers I got a few pointers. I also have a little section off to the side of every quilt where I can play with tension, so I did that first. This is with Sulky Metallic on the top and Bottom Line in the bobbin. I do have a photo of what I did later on the mountains but for that I just used Mettler Silk Finish and Bottom Line in the Bottom. Simple lines in the mountains in matching thread.

Today I am going to figure out the water! Now that is gonna be a trick but hopefully I will figure that out.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008




What does one do on Spring Break to get out of the cold? Well mostly that means heading South to a warmer climate. For us this meant Texas right down to the Mexico border in Big Bend National Park. I had been there many years ago as a child so did not really remember much about it. The beauty of the desert is just awesome. There was so much to see and do. We spent 6 nights camping right there on the border. You could see Mexico right across the lazy Rio Grande slowly meandering its way towards the Gulf of Mexico.
One thing that amazed me was the history of the place. The park ranger described it as one of the most remote of places in the continental US. To me though it was full of people dating back to ancient times. There were many sites that held the ruins of old ranches and even a resort at a natural hotspring.
On the way home we stopped at the Salinas ruins where I took the photo of the pot. I just love the black on white pottery that is even still made today by the local Pueblo Indians.
The past week has been a very busy one trying to get caught up on quilting and projects that are waiting to be made. I did manage to cross four more things off my list of quilts to be finished.