Three finishes!

Boy do I have a bad case of winter! Symptoms are a desire to sleep unreasonably late and an uncontrollable urge to eat chocolate. Unfortunately, the only cure is spring and that seems a very long time away.

But I did get three journal quilts finished over the weekend. Dogwood was the first, and needed beading for the center of the flowers, and binding. I'm pleased with the way it turned out.

The other two are painted quilts, which I'd worked on over the weekend and just needed binding.

Iris was the first quilt in my DIY challenge. The words I drew were Metallic, Sunrise and Tech. I really couldn't think of anything high tech for a subject, at least that went with sunrise, so I decided on a high tech look for the flower vase. For this one I pieced the "table" and "sky" together, then thread-sketched the irises and vase. I started by thread painting the irises yellow with a purple center, but they got lost when I painted the sky with sunrise colors. I quilted the outlines of the vase and the sun's rays, and then painted them in with the Lumiere paints.

I liked the sunrise effect, and I do a lot of quilts based on lighthouses, so I decided on a painted lighthouse as the next piece. For this one I started with a single piece of fabric for background, layered (and basted the edges), then thread sketched in the lighthouse, area of water, area of land and sky. Then I used appropriate colors to quilt in the details in each area. I used the Lumiere paints to paint inside the quilted lines. The white and black are Opaque colors in the Lumiere line and looked too flat against the others, so I highlighted the black with a blue metallic and the white with silver.

After I finished up all the bindings, I used my new Sidewinder to wind a bunch of bobbins. It doesn't wind as well as winding on my machine, it stops too soon and isn't quite as even, but it is nice not to have to unthread the machine I'm sewing on to wind bobbins.

And I finally caught up with the exercises from the Art of Silliness. I'm enjoying the exercises, but since I'd been behind I haven't kept up with the class. I'm going to try to keep up for the rest of the class.

It's a gray and gloomy day, so I'm hoping the rain will clear in time for me to go to guild tonight. More later.