Technical support to the rescue. The photographer has made me a detail to show the chain stitch. So here you are:

I finished my crazy patchwork mini-quilt today. It’s 25 cm square and I actually did put a binding on. When I come to think about it I believe this is the first piece from the C&G’s course that I have actually “finished”. I’ve been treating everything as samples up to now and haven’t bothered to complete them with batting and binding. Although there are some pieces that I feel are good enough to warrant the treatment. Myrna would not be pleased with me.

But this time I felt that it was time to go the whole hog and put a binding on too. I can’t remember the last time I actually made a whole quilt, whatever the size. But before binding it there were a few other things to do. I sewed down all the patches with different threads and embroidery stitches on my machine. Sometimes it’s a bit tricky to judge when to stop to turn a corner, the needle is jumping around all over the place. I also added some of the sheer fabric as patches over the rest using gold thread to sew them down. They added a bit of interest where there was just plain coloured fabric. Then I did a bit of hand embroidery and added a few sequins sewn down with beads in one corner.

So here it is:

And here’s a detail to show some of the hand embroidery. I tried out doing chain stitch with two colours of thread. Once you get the hang of it, it’s quite easy. You can’t really see it on the photo on the blog It’s the brown and yellow stitching in the left hand corner. I added some straight stitches too.

I spent quite a few evenings this week hand embroidering the edges of the leaves on my broderie perse piece. It was quite hard work sometimes where the acrylic paint was quite thick and I ended up with a blunt needle.

Originally it had been my intention to only use one half of the background fabric but when I saw the photo up here on the blog I decided that I liked the effect using the whole piece of fabric. It needed a little something to balance the 2 sides and as I had one leaf motif left over I put that on the right hand side. To make it a little different I added some veins to the leaf in stem stitch, again using 2 strands of stranded embroidery thread.

Here is the whole piece with all the embroidery finished:

And here are some details:

I like the finished piece so much that although I’ve done all that was required for the activity on the C&G course I think I will bat it and quilt it too. This one is a piece that is more than just a sample. It wants to get finished.

That’s the name of my latest quilt. I first heard this as a conundrum from my Granny when I was a little girl. It was: What’s black and white and read all over? It’s one of those phrases which pop into your head and wants to be made into a quilt. It’s been lurking there in my brain and been pushed to the back of the queue by other projects, but it finally made it to the top of the stack and here it is.

It is the third quilt I’ve made using structured fabrics. Like the first one I made the design is based on an Amish design. This time it was the Center Diamond. The free motion machine quilting has improved again on this quilt. The stitching is quite even in most places. It got a bit jaggy when the quilt caught on the edge of the extension table to the machine. So now I’m seriously thinking about how to set up the machine so that it has a flat bed.

The latest issue of Quilting Arts arrived in time for me to try out the idea of doing a round of stitching just inside the binding. I was thinking of adding a thin piping of red fabric, but I liked the idea of the stitching even better - more subtle. I added just a few beads and buttons to some of the squares in the center tilted diamond. And I finally got around to ticking off another thing on my list of ideas to try and did some hand embroidery as embellishment on the outer border of black and white stripes. Not too much as I was using red embroidery thread and I’m a great believer in less is more.

There will shortly be a new album in my gallery with more photos of the quilt, including one of the back where you can admire my machine quilting

P.S. The answer to the conundrum is a newspaper. Well I never said it was a difficult one, I was quite young at the time!

Yesterday I did some auditioning of various threads and stitches to neaten the edges of the figures on Blue and Green. I finally settled on black thread with cross stitch. I tried out neutral thread - the same colour as the figures and also variegated blue but the black actually looked the best. I didn’t want the heavy stitching of satin stitch so the cross stitch worked out as a good compromise.
Here are one pair of figures:

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.

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!

I finished the quilting and beading on my colour burst quilt yesterday. I even got out the monofilament nylon thread again for the first time in ages. There were too many large areas where the sandwich wasn’t sewn together and after trying some quilting with sewing thread I went back to the invisible thread as I really only wanted the quilting but not the visibility on the quilt top. I am quite pleased with the results:

Now I have to decide how to finish off the edge. I am toying with the idea of just folding over the extra backing and sewing it down on the front. If I do a traditional binding I would use the same material as the backing as I think the colour gives a good border to the quilt. I shall pin the backing down on the front and see what I feel before making a decision.