Applique is my Passion

This is the quilt I have been working on for the last 2 or 3 years.   It is made up of little samples I made as experiments and some blocks with nothing in particular.  All the blocks are hand dyed by me and then combined by overlapping the edges and hand embroidering over those joints.  My thought is to have a professionally quilted by a long-arm machine.  Without batting and backing, it already weighs at least 10 lbs.  There is no way for me to quilt this on my home sewing machine, especially when my cat is riding on the quilt.

I finished the quilt that I showed the beginning of last July, on December or January 2019.  Essentially I tried to explain the thought process involved in making up your own design while using some of my techniques.  My direction came from the quilt which was telling me what to do next.  You can see from the beginnings photo how I added strips of hand dyed wool fabrics going round in log cabin style. The techniques I used and explained in the pattern were felted applique, couching of wool yarns, 3-D leaves and lots of hand embroidery. Now, as soon as I finished this Doodle quilt, I started on the second one.  It is much different than the first but continues on in the same techniques.

  You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.  -Maya Angelou

This is the finished Doodle quilt which I completed in maybe Jan.2019.  The whole idea is that I let the quilt tell me what it wanted to become. Boy, that is FUN.  There is no plan, no idea what the finished quilt will look like.  Apparently, that concept is really scary for most quilters.  I LOVE playing with colors and textures.  

My world has turned upside down when Paul, my dh, fell on his head when setting up a show in MD the day before Thanksgiving 2017.  He has had so many setbacks, it isn't funny.   He would get better, and then something would happen.  He broke his pelvis falling out of a wheelchair at the second nursing home.  He had an operation to fix that.  He spent a week in intensive care.  A doctor actually asked me if he should have a feeding tube!  I wouldn't make that decision.  Paul said "No way!"  He has been in three different hospitals and two different nursing homes several times.  Finally June 1st he was released from the nursing home.  Now he has been released from home health care and PT, only to find that he can't start outpatient neurologic physical therapy until August 7th.  I called the home health care and asked to have him reinstated.  They now need to get new papers to have him covered for the next two week...

My first experiments with ponchos I am wondering if I need to add a button at the wrist. My goal is to make the colors blend like watercolor paintings. I've been hand dying jacket weight wool fabrics for a few years now.  I use them in my needle felted appliqued quilts.  But I've had the urge to expand into ponchos and other simple jacket shapes.  Maybe there also needs to be an appliqued animal or two.

How many of you think beading is tedious?  This bug shape is from our Beetles pattern  I punch needled the blue and green threads to a piece of white cotton, and then added the beads and then appliqued it onto the sleeve of a white wool jacket.  The hairy legs are small bugle beads.  I made this around 2006 when I was testing out alternative techniques to applique.  I eventually gave up punch needle because my left wrist started to hurt, holding the hoop that held the cotton taut.  I own a Morgan hoop now, but the other issue was that it just took too long to see a finished result.  Needle Felted Applique goes faster, filling in an area. I started doing needle felted applique in 2007 when I found the tool that I use now: Clovers pink felting tool with three needles.  My first felted quilt/pattern was the Crazy Sheep . and it was started as  machine applique quilt and grew into felting and there are even some beads on the quilt in th...

One of my customers is getting paralyzed with starting...spending a lot of time collecting fabrics, rovings instead of diving in on her project.  Here is what I shared with her to get her off the dime: You just need to get started and work a little bit every day.  If something doesn't work, it isn't failure, it is a learning experience.  Felting is quite easy to change.  You can cut areas away, pull off the felting, cover up something you don't like and don't forget, the most important guide: it doesn't have to be PERFECT!!  Art is a progression.  I am never satisfied, I could always do it better...The NEXT piece will be better,  but you have to get over fussing and actually DO something today.  or you will never get to being better tomorrow.

I was bitten by a tick on Thursday last week.  He embedded his head really well into my chest.  I used a tick twister, which looks like a green plastic mini-crowbar, but I couldn't get it under the tick.  I ended up using a tweezer but the body broke in two, leaving the head stuck in my skin.  I learned that tick have reverse barbs on the heads, making it difficult to remove.  I had a friend who got a tick bite as a kid and the skin grew over the tick part.  This later gave her some health issues.  So I knew I needed to have the head removed but where should I go? I called my family doctor's office and a P.A. called me back and agreed with me to have it removed at an Urgent Care facility.  So I went to the internet expecting to find one close to me.  I couldn't find any.  I finally called the local hospital and was directed to their "Express Care", which was the same location where I had gone for a cat bite, four years ago.  only t...

I just finished quilting this quilt top.  I was crunched for time because I needed send the quilt off so I could enter it in the 2017 Mountain Quiltfest in Pigeon Forge TN.  There is no chance to win any prize money since they have a clause that disqualifies me because I am a pattern designer.  When I get the quilt back, I will quilt some more on the borders.  The name of the quilt is Another Flock, because it is loosely based on my New Flock of Sheep pattern.  

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.

This is the newest mini quilt in felted applique technique called  Cat Faces in Wool.   It is a good beginner pattern to start needle felting because it is only 15" square.   I had a duplicate design that I made by accident.  It was exactly like one of the birds in the Birds in Wool quilt top I am working on.  So I just made it into a block.  Maybe I'll frame it.  It is 10" high x 11" wide. This is my wool birds quilt so far.  I am going to add two more birds in the corners at the bottom.  The borders and the cornerstones are just pinned on, so they are a bit wonky.  The borders are 6" wide to give you an idea of scale.  The question right now is which border arrangement will I choose? or something totally different?

It is always a challenge to think up a new theme to try for my Felted Applique technique.  I have been kicking around the idea of birds since my Birds and Flowers machine applique pattern is about to run out.  There is so much more I can do with felting than machine applique to make the birds look more real with shading and hand embroidery for the details.  The trick to getting the birds to look like their real buddies out at my bird feeder is getting the beaks the right shape and with sharp points.   The dove at the bottom left still needs legs and feet, but they may go into the border. The crazy quilt stitching where the blocks overlap is my unique take on basic stitches like feather stitch or herringbone stitch and adding more stitches to the “arms” of the base stitch like a chain stitch, or fly, or French knot (I prefer a  Colonial stitch  to French knot because they don't get pulled to the wrong side of the quilt top). On our trip to M...

  Woolly Fish, the idea of it, is so crazy.  I used the drawings from my Tropical Fish pattern which I first published in 1990 as a cotton quilt.  I've been focusing on wool since 2007 when I found the felting tool.  I have been tweaking my technique ever since.  Behind each critter is a wool applique on top of a hand dyed wool background.  Then I used the felting tool with three barbed needles, to poke wool hand dyed fibers, covering up the applique so you can't see any of it.  The applique serves as a easy way to copy the shape of a design without tracing.  More and more fish appliques were arranged and poked and then the environment was incorporated into the design...a sea fan, sea weeds,  kelp, sea cucumbers that look like tubes, and corals... The backgrounds are composed of 10" hand dyed strips, going sideways.  Some were not the right size for the width of the quilt as it was developing, so I added scraps by felting th...

Here is my husband,Paul's, cat Pollyester learning how to quilt.  She weighs about 7 1/2 lbs. and was actually riding around on my Woolly Fish quilt was I tried to finish. 

I am quilting the Woolly Fish quilt now, and I have given myself a deadline to finish it by Dec 15th so I can sent the photos to my niece, who creates my "artwork" that gets uploaded to the printer in California, so they can FedEx it to me in Orlando where I will be teaching a class using that new quilt pattern on January 8th. I ran out of the invisible thread this afternoon.  Dreaded situation.  I needed it to finish the quilt for the bobbin thread.  No, I couldn't get it sent from Joann's.  No time to wait.  I called on the cell phone the two fabric stores I've been to which might carry the thread.  No dice.  Then I remembered there is a quilt shop in the area of Kutztown (the next town south of here).  I asked the smart phone for Covered Bridge, before I could say quilt shop, I was shown all the covered bridges within 10 miles.  I asked the phone again "Covered Bridge Quilt Shop in Kutztown" and she sent me to Wooden Bridge Quilt Sho...

Fish felted from wool fibers is bizarre, don't you think?  Recently I've been working on fish appliques with my hand dyed wool fabric.  Four wool fabrics have been felted together using my felting machine which saves time, instead of felting them by hand. They could be sewn together too.There is a separate strip of three fish at the bottom. Two black fish are ready to be felted.  Right below them is a yellow fish still in progress.  The fins on the fishes sides are 3-D.  By shading the wool fibers from lighter bellies to darker on the top side, the fish look more realistic. You can see in the close up that the edges of this fish still show a little the black fabric I used for the applique, and under the gill area.  I am having so much fun with the embroidered details.  The coral in the upper corner are felted down using the felting machine.  They are scraps of hand dyed wool.  I haven't  embroidered them yet. Here is a...

The Woolly Alphabet pattern is now ready for sale.  It took us a long time to figure out how we wanted to include six printed color pages in the pattern.  The color cover was a given but the keep costs down, we assembled five color pages so there are detail photos of ALL the blocks, rather than making a little bit of color on many pages. We dithered on making posters of our felted applique patterns and decided to make a poster of the New Flock of Sheep in 18"x24" and we will be printing our Noah's Ark machine appliqued quilt on the other side.  The paper will be 100 lb coated stock and there will be no ink bleeding through as we have used this paper for our paper pattern covers which are now sporting double sided printing as we publish new patterns and reprinting the older ones that we have reprinted.  The second side is a detail shot of part of the quilt on the cover, or many detail photos showing the technique used. So now the quest is to update my whole we...

I updated the Show Schedule for 2015.  As we are getting older, Paul and I are flying less and driving to shows closer to our home which is in PA.  (Believe it or not, not wanting to fly has to do with the disruption of our body cIocks: if we have to get up at 2 or 3AM to catch a flight at 6AM to someplace out west, losing 3 hours of time change...we never seem to catch up to local time and it is time to come home. Then it takes three days to get back to normal.)   I have indicated which shows have invited me to teach.  You can click on those shows’ web sites to see which Felted Applique class I will be offering.  We still have a few shows that haven’t gotten back to us yet, so we may be adding a few more.

I finished the Woolly Alphabet quilt in September and am now writing the pattern.  This is a pattern that needs to have all the designs in color detail photos.  We have decided to add an extra color page or two so you can see all the stitches and beads and color changes, not for you to copy exactly what I’ve done, but to show you options. The first time I will be teaching the Woolly Alphabet pattern will be at Mancuso’s best show on the east coast: Hampton VA.    Nothing like having a deadline over your head to get things done.   I entered the quilt in PIQF, Mancuso's best show on the west coast, and it didn't win any prizes.  When I saw the judges comments I understood.  They said glowing things about the quilt until they got to the zinger (encouragement to make better quilts in the future).  They said I should have hand quilted it.  Okay, my next crazy quilt will have no batting…I am thinking it might have a fish th...