Applique is my Passion

Birds in Wool, the pattern will be available January 30, 2017 at Critter Pattern Works  Exploring feather stitch..to attach a leaf shape to the background or,  draw the shapes of feathers,  double feather stitch over the the background overlapped joins  different lengths on the arms of the feather stitches. Feather stitching with fly stitches and lazy daisy stitches on the arms. Herringbone stitches and do-dads attached to the x's.

I am thrilled to be able to finally see the end coming to the Alphabet quilt in Wool that I have been working on since last summer.  The border is on, and I am now adding some trim between the main part of the quilt and the border.  I have auditioned the trim here to see if I liked it.  The trim is two wool yarns that I had in my stash that I ply-ed together and then ply-ed that on itself so that it is four yarns for thickness to cover where I joined the border. This trim also helps to hold the border on because I hand- sewed it on and the sewing goes through the border and the part with the letters.   Here is a closeup of the hand embroidery.

I've been exploring wool and dyeing along with needle felted appliques these past 8 months.   I started with white wool fabric and dyeing it with instructions in some dyeing books.  A little knowledge and a lot of experimental got me some dyed fabric that doesn't look like batik (which looks like everybody else's).  I was trying to find  the colors for a background that I could embellish with hand embroidery and felting as in these examples: I was thinking these strips would become borders for the Newest Flock of Sheep...one that has more open space to quilt.  However I found that they are too busy in design for that felted applique quilt.  The next quilt project is a reworking of the Alphabet quilt that I designed in 1996 in cotton. This is the new wool version:   All the wool fabrics, rovings and pearl cotton threads have been hand dyed by me. The Quail and the Rat are still appliques, and will get needle felted tomor...