Applique is my Passion

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...