Applique is my Passion

This is my newest pattern, Dragonflies in Wool.  Each of the images of the dragonflies is an applique.  The stems of the flowers are green wool yarn and the flowers are free form created, not using appliques, based on a photo I took last summer.  Here is the dragonflies with flowers from my yard laid in place.  I copied the positions of most of the flowers.  Here it is 9 months later and I finally finished the pattern .  Sometimes it takes me a long time to figure out what to do next.  I hand dyed all the roving (wool fibers) threads and wool fabrics, because this is fun to me.  The colors work well together because of this.  The bees and the dragonflies wings were made by mixing Angelina (thin iridescent plastic fibers) with the wool rovings, making them sparkly..

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...

I saw this plant, called Crocosmia, several years ago on a gardening show, Gardening by the Yard, and I had to have one.  So I bought one at the local nursery in August when it was in bloom,  I planted it and it died during the winter.  I found some corms at the grocery (Wegman's carries an interesting assortment of things in addition to foodstuff).  I bought the box of corms and planted them.  They apparently grew because now I have two plants with flower buds and I am so excited.  I have never seen a flowering plant that I was so drawn to.  It is as graceful as a dancer.  I love curved lines.  I have been drawing this plant on some of my felted blocks, without knowing that there are more groups of flowers on the same stem.  This makes the flower more complex.  Complex design is very enticing to me. Here is what I drew in thread after observing the crocosmia.  The flowers on the right are new stitches and the ones on the...

I am fascinated with dying now.  One of the drawbacks to dying is walking around with colored hands, because I keep forgetting to keep my gloves on.  I am playing around with wool fabrics, embroidery threads and wool fibers.  The most fun is the stitching with hand dyed embroidery threads.  When I first embroidered the Crazy Sheep quilt, as I ran out of a colored thread, I would pick up another color or at least a different shade, and continue on with my stitching. Now I am able to use one thread and with many color changes in my embroidery without so many starts and stops.  The dyeing process is addictive.  I can't wait to see what colors emerge.  I have been using my acid dyes (which work well on wool) for my pearl cotton embroidery threads.  There are special dyes for cotton, that probably work better than the ones for wool.  I will experiment with them later, as it requires buying more stuff.  Once I found that they didn't need to...

People get so hung up on a making a project  perfect.  It is so much more fun to have a dialogue with your project, sometimes it speaks to you while you are asleep, or at the art museum and you have an "ah ha!" moment and can move on to the next step.  The hardest part of this quilt was figuring out how to teach someone who can't draw, how to make realistic animal designs with felted appliques.  That eureka moment came when I learned how to make stencils from my patterns. I sent the Wannabees (above) to a quilt show in Oregon this summer and the comment that came back from the judges, was that I should be more careful at the beginning and endings of my quilting stitches.  (I have no idea what they are talking about!) It didn't matter to them that I was quilting a large 6 lb. quilt on my HOME SEWING MACHINE and that the quilting was not the outstanding feature of the quilt.  They didn't seem to notice that I was doing something that nobody else...

This past two weeks or so, I have been working with my niece, who is also my graphic designer, designing a banner to hang in our booth at quilt shows.  We collaborated to get the finished design to the printer.  My major in college was Fabric Design...before computers, Katherine's major was Graphic Design with courses in Illustrator.  For me to learn Illustrator would be a steep learning curve.  We started out with the purpose of the banner: to explain why our patterns are loved by our customers.  I wrote the benefits and she designed the layout which went through quite a lot of changes.  Without trying to hurt her feelings, I asked her why she chose the background colors she chose.  She replied that choosing colors was not her forte.  I suggested that she look at www.design-seeds.com.  She suggested that I research the colors I wanted.  I came up with this as my first choice: I loved how the animals looked in silhouette, but Paul...

I don't know what took so long.  Usually it doesn't take a month to finish writing a pattern, but I guess I wasn't as focused as I usually am.  The Crows pattern has 17 pages, seven pages of which are of crows drawings and one page of feather drawings for the quilting in the border.   Crows pattern  is up on our website ready to fly to your house as a PDF pattern or a printed snail mailed pattern.