APPLIQUE PAINTBOX-I LOVE APPLIQUE: Sky quilting

Sunday, October 4, 2020

IN WHICH I FIND I HAVE LEARNED HOW TO MAKE PAGES

I would still be wondering around in the dark re: pages if it were not for excellent instructions and advice from Gretchen at Gretchen's little Corner and Cheeky Cognoscenti aka Rebecca Deming. Originally I wanted to enable a click on the quilts on the sidebar to take one to the quilt details but I think blogger is not sophisticated enough though blogger is excellent at doing what it is supposed to do.

I am also getting better at mastering tension with monofilament. I am using wonderfil 80 wt deco-bob in the bobbin.

I decided to go with a striated quilting for this sky with this beautiful fabric from Jennifer Sampou's sky collection, as it seems a layered sky.

Beautiful sky and leaves

Quaking aspens is what my trees are.

November foliage

We are going backward in time...this is October

I stuffed the pumpkins. Love the delicate foliage

For this sky, I jaggedly outlined the orangey sunset streaks to add some drama

This sky fabric is perfect for an October sunset. It took several months of searching to find an orange casted sky fabric which was not overwhelmed by the color orange.

Glorious colors for the leaves. Some are variegated threads and some are not.

An owl on the lookout for mice.

Yesterday on our drive to the nature trails, we saw a huge hawk in someone's yard. We thought at first it was a statue so unusual it is to see such a thing. As we watched, the hawk struggled to its wings and took off in a low flight with a heavy grey squirrel in its talons.

Backwards to September.

This sky is another of Jenn Sampou's sky fabric-I used 4 in all. It is not as dramatic as some of her skies so I decided to do a windy look. Quilting with Helen Godden has taught me lots of techniques and ways to approach a subject. One of the tips she gave us is to have the quilting "disappear" behind the forefront in this case the trees and also to have the quilting slip off the sides of the block as it the sky goes on but you cannot see it.

The moose among the turning foliage

This tree fabric I think is perfect to do what is it called upon to do. Trees turn so many beautiful colors in the fall..purples, oranges, roses, rusts...you know the rest.

Swirly skies. Fall is my favorite season.

3months remain to be quilted-the summer months of June, July, and August. Then the crazy quilting......

Before I do that however, I will return to Helen Godden's Midnight Magic quilt. I ran out of the black background fabric ,which appears to be out of print now, and since it is patterned, however subdued, that specific fabric was necessary. I finally found some and it will arrive on Tuesday. Whew!

Post linking up with:

Patchwork and Quilt at www.quiltingpatch.blogspot.com

Sew and Tell Monday with Bambi at http://bambisyr-evaj.blogspot.com/
Monday Making at http://lovelaughquilt.blogspot.com/
Design Wall Monday at https://smallquiltsanddollquilts.blogspot.com/

LongArm Learning at http://cheekycognoscenti.blogspot.com/

Free Motion Mavericks at http://lizzielenard-vintagesewing.blogspot.com/

Needle and Thread Thursday at http://www.myquiltinfatuation.com/
Finished or Not Friday at http://alyciaquilts.blogspot.com/
Off the Wall Friday at http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com/
Whoop Whoop Fridays at http://confessionsofafabricaddict.blogspot

Keep creating, stay well, stay cheerful

Wednesday, September 30, 2020

IN WHICH I THOUGHT I WAS THE QUEEN OF MONOFILIAMENT AND THEN REALIZED I WASN'T

THE STORY OF TENSION

What a pretty quilting pattern! The month is april , windy April shaking the cherry blossom branches. HOWEVER....the tension is too tight. I have a cool attachment on Queenie, the greatest quilting machine ever, which tells me the number of the top tension:

The readout is really helpful as it tells me the relative numbers of the tension. No matter how I set it though, the tension was off. SO...following Helen Godden's instructions for using gold metallic thread, I took my heart in my hands and adjusted the bottom tension. Here is the clever part tho which is probably obvious to most everyone else....lets say clever for me. I took a phone photo of the original setting so I can always find it again.

Am I good or what!

April was the first month I quilted :

Even tho the first thing I do with my quilts is wet them and then put them in the dryer to shrink and crinkle, you can see the tension is too tight. It looks nice and crinkly but the quilt design pattern is lost.

onwards....January....

This is a bit better but I still have not adjusted the bottom tension so there is more drawing up by the quilting than should be

I liked how the snowy ground turned out

The idea behind this sky was to create a puffy snowy cloud appearance

You can see from this one that the fabric looks like a snow fall.

Onwards...December...in which I adjust the bobbin tension

There was not much sky quilting on this block-mostly outlining and foreground.
Silver thread on the snow for glitter and pretty pinecones

Tension was pretty good on this one

Onwards...May

You can see the tension is looser

Going for a bit of a stormy sky here .

Onwards...March

Lots of sky here

My cat Alyosha's spring activities

A clam and wavy sky

"blue" birds guarding their nest

And lastly, February...Sunset in the cold and frosty pine forest

So here are the first 6 months and I have completed some of summer and fall seasons also.

It turned out that the thread I had bought for this project-invisafil 100 wt in antique worked really well but showed up too much. I then bought a huge spool (don't) know what I was thinking-it will last me a life time) of clear Superior Monopoly 100 wt which is much more difficult to work with than the invisifil. Then was when the tension problems occurred. As I said these were solved pretty well by loosen the bobbin tension.

I WANT TO THANK ....

Gretchen of http://gretchenslittlecorner.blogspot.com/

and

Rebecca of https://www.rebeccagracequilting.com/ AKA Cheeky Cognoscenti

for their answers to my request of help on how to do pages in a blog. I might be able to accomplish this now with their excellent help.