I made another three squares this weekend. I’m not sure at the moment what I’m going to do with them all. I don’t particularly want to make a quilt out of them. I thought I may just make some kind of fabric book to use as a reference of ideas.
Here are the latest photos. The first one is appliqué with couched threads to cover the raw edges.

Followed by a detail:

Then a square with little bitty bits of chopped up left over fabric.

And a close up to show the metallic thread holding all the bits down:

Some thread painting

And a last detail. The size of my stitches in the free motion quilting is getting more even. Still need to work on the smoothness of the motion.

It’s certainly been a lot of fun making these squares. Lots of new techniques and threads.

I am still playing with threads on various sample blocks. This weekend I finished another four blocks and went back and added some extra embellishment to a couple of the original blocks. There are still another 4 blocks to go. I am now a week behind with my homework Two of the blocks were supposed to be bobbin work. I ordered a spare bobbin case on ebay, for the express purpose of doing bobbin work. It arrived last week and I was ready to play this weekend. Unfortunately it doesn’t work in my machine. I can sew about 2 inches, then it goes clunk and the top thread breaks
Here are the first two blocks which were made using two different methods of machine appliqué. The first block is sewn onto fusible interfacing and then ironed onto the background fabric and stitched down with invisible thread:

The second was using reverse appliqué, which I preferred because the results are less bulky.

Here’s a detail: (Don’t look too closely at the free motion quilting - still practising)

The next block was fun to make. The network of threads is made by sewing over Solvy, which is then dissolved in warm water to leave a spider’s web of thread connecting the inside shape to the outer frame of the block. (There is no fabric - just the thread web.) This was to have been using thicker thread and bobbin work, but I just used normal thread so as not to mess too much with my only functioning bobbin case. The results were fine anyway.

And a detail:

And finally some more embellishment. The small square (top left) and the large L-shaped area (bottom right) have “Wonder Under” that has been painted with fabric paint, ironed on and then gold foil ironed on top.

My gold foil and fabric paints arrived in the week so I was able to play with them at the weekend. This is continuing the class I am taking at QU. We were supposed to paint fusible webbing and then apply it to our patch. The metal foil was then to be applied on top of the painted webbing. Since some people had been having trouble with their painted fusible webbing not wanting to fuse, and I could only get Wonder Under, which was the problem child, I decided just to paint onto the fabric, which turned out quite well.
Then I put some Wonder Under on the painted patch and tried to get the gold foil to stick - no success. So then I tried ironing under baking parchment. No success. After consulting the website selling the foil and other sites selling foil and reading the lesson notes again, I thought that maybe the “coloured” side up mentioned was the other side to that which I’d had showing. (I ended up with just gungey foil and shiny glue on the patch with my first attempts). So I turned my foil over and ironed it for good luck - and ended up with an excess of foil on my patch - and no paint showing. So then I painted on top of that. It’s not looking too bad now - but that patch has certainly had “the works”

After that experience I went for the powder glue on my other patches. Still managed to iron the wrong side once again. But I’m learning slowly. I have some nice distressed bits of gold foil on my other patches.

I’ve rather gone from one extreme to the other!

The foil looks silver on this photo rather gold. But you get the general idea.

The front was finished before we even got to England. I knitted most of the back in Brighton over Christmas. So when we got home I just had to sew the seams and knit the neck and armhole welts. All done now.

Here is a photo of the finished model:

And here is the model wearing it on the night it was finshed

P.S. Yesterday I took the two balls of yarn that were surplus to requirements back to the shop to get a refund, which I promptly spent (plus some more) on new wool for another pullover. This time with sleeves. Should keep me busy a bit longer.

Well I’ve been quiet for a time now. We were back in the UK at Christmas so I took my knitting and made good progress on that.

Since being back I’ve joined a QU class to learn about using different threads for quilting. Not only that, but in the first lesson I have learned a whole lot about spools of thread and how to use them on the machine, that I didn’t know before. Did you know there is a right and wrong way to have your thread coming off the spool? Well I certainly didn’t.

We are making a set of small square samples using various threads.
cotton and rayon
metallics and slivers
twisted metallics
double threads

The metallics are quite hard to photograph. They are silver, green, gold and black & gold. In the double thread sampler we were threading 2 threads through the needle. It’s amazing how much time it took to create those four little squares!