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.

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...