First finishes of the year

Great day yesterday, despite the cold. I figured out how to set up the Treadlin' Bloggers webring, for bloggers who use and/or collect vintage or antique sewing machines. The first sites have been entered, though at the moment two are waiting for their code so they can be activated.

Then it was into the studio. Forget organization, I wanted to create. First project was to finish my painted quilt. I finished a last bit of quilting, then added a tiny binding matching the border, using my Davis VF to sew it on. The binding would have turned out nicely except that in a moment when my brain was turned off (only explanation) I tried to trim up the batting and backing and cut the binding at the corners. We just won't talk about what the corners look like on the back.

The second finish is a quilted purse. This was another of my demo pieces. I kept adding to the quilting, decided I liked it and then had to design the purse to use the piece at the size it happened to be. Fortunately I had more of the black and was able to quilt an additional piece for the back and flap of the purse so I could complete it.

I know I've talked about how these pieces were started before, but a quick recap. I used some random fabrics to set up sandwiches for my demo at our guild's quilt show back in October. I did free motion on my treadle sewing machine, with no particular pattern in mind, just showing people what you can do. I ended up with about a half-dozen similar pieces that I set aside. Some, which showed up better, had light thread on the dark background, some had used a bright pink, which didn't show up as well as I'd hoped.

Later I wanted to try out some multi-line quilting techniques, loosely based on Patsy Thompson's hyper-quilting (she uses stencils and is very precise, mine is more fluid).  I used a very small piece first, added quilting until I was happy, accented with Shiva paint sticks and was pleased with the result. So I started working on the next piece, which I ended up using in the purse. The painted quilt I did a little differently, because I started with just the demo quilting, then worked out the painting and additional quilting together. For that one I used Lumiere paint.

Now its on to the next projects. I have several ideas competing to be next.

 More later.