I had a good night in the studio last night. I alternated between working on my dogwood piece and an effort for my DIY challenge. I'm not sure about the challenge piece, so I'll just tell you about the dogwood.This one is another effort at combining different techniques. The background is pieced from a variety of black print fabrics. Then I layered and thread sketched a branch and leaves, using decorative threads and echo quilting, then quilted the rest of the background using black thread. A good idea here (which I always forget) is to baste all the way around the quilt before starting thread sketching and quilting. That should help reduce the distortion.
After quilting, I painted the branch and main leaves, using the Lumiere paints.
Then I got to the tedious part. I wanted to make the dogwood flowers with dimensional applique, my term for creating the item separately, layering and quilting it, then adding it to the background. I used this technique in my Angels of the Garden.
My original plan was for a lot of dogwood flowers, so I drew a zillion petals on freezer paper, cut them out and pressed onto the wrong side of my flower fabric. Then I cut apart in sets of four petals, laid them right sides together with a second piece of the fabric and stitched around the freezer paper templates, leaving space at the end of the petals to turn them. After cutting them out, clipping curves and removing the , I turned them right side out and used the freezer paper template to cut batting (from scraps) to fill. After tucking in the batting, I hand-sewed the petals closed.After trying some different arrangements, I decided o just three flowers. Then it was back to my free motion machine (my Singer 15-30 treadle) to stitch down the petals, working from the center and leaving the outside edges free.
Next step is some beading, then finish the edges. What do you think?
More later.
