Ticker Tape Workshops

A few weeks ago I gave the Ticker Tape workshop I developed from my Wilbur scrap quilt to the Western Branch of the Irish Patchwork Society in Galway. This was my third time giving this workshop and I have been adding to the templates for people to try. I used the guitar as a teaching piece and am working on a sketch of a West Highland Terrier for one of the ladies in my own branch, the Mid-Western Branch in Limerick.

Not everyone has been lucky enough to have a Basset Hound in their house (?) so I have added in other shapes for people to try including cats, teddy bears and other breeds of dogs! For some reason, just like when making Wilbur, I got the head and body drawn up on the Westie no problem but struggled with the legs. I think I have his little feet right now and am making adjustments for the next class which is in a Quilt Shop in Tuam, Co. Galway called Quilt, Yarn, Stitch. Really looking forward to the 2nd December and teaching my first quilt shop class! Very exciting!

This is a photo of the progress made by Nora on the scrappy Teddy on the day in Galway and below is a photo I took of Olena's dragon she made from the workshop given to the Eastern branch of the IPS in Dublin. I had the honour of being mentioned in her artist's statement when she showed it at the River of Dreams quilt exhibition in Limerick this year.

That was a special exhibition as in addition to the bed quilts on display there was a wall of donated baby quilts for the Henry Bear charity where each child undergoing heart surgery gets a quilt to wrap them up in for their recovery.

 Mine was Kenny the Koala! And he ended up a pattern.  

It's funny where an idea for a quilt can take you and what can develop from it!

Workshops!

 Say hi to the new basset puppy that will be decorating my sewing space!  No we didn't get another real puppy (1 is enough - she is at the chewing stage eating shoes, laptop chargers, wires of any kind and poor Wilbur's ears!)

At the weekend, Karen at the Limerick Quilt Centre, had a needle felting workshop and I went along armed with an inspiration picture I found as a free colouring page. download here on ZileArt.com.

Dean the Basset Dog became a puppy and I had a brilliant day filling in the background with soft Merino wool and adding mad colour.  I think he is a very happy puppy and will look brilliant in a box frame on the wall.

We were given a kit, complete with coloured wool, needle and handle, big foam square and a wool background.  It was so lovely to rock up to a sewing workshop having to bring only myself and no machine, mat, cutter, extension lead, iron and board, scissors, thread, fabric and pins. You know how it goes!

Still it has to be done from time to time.  Our branch of the Irish Patchwork Society had Ailbhe O'Callaghan up from the Cork branch to teach us her technique on sewing really skinny lines.  We're talking less than 1/4" for most of them. 

Ailbhe gave us fabric to practice on and it took the whole morning to piece in these 3 lines!  We were all concentrating really hard to get them perfect!  Ailbhe is going to use all our practice pieces for a quilt which I thought was a great idea!

In the afternoon, we had a go at designing our own bigger project using lines of different colours.  I went for a grid as an underlay and they added some triangles on top.

To be honest I spent the rest of the class fiddling as I couldn't make my mind up which way to go. 

A giant A or maybe something that looks like a Star Trek communicator?

I was also distracted  by everyone else's progress and couldn't resist wandering around the room.  I just loved Claire's bright neon look.

Even her scraps were gorgeous!

That's as far as I got, 1 finished and 1 designed, kind of!  I'm happy with that, every little helps, right?

Can you see hedgehogs?

Last weekend was almost entirely a sewing weekend!  We had our branch meeting on the Friday night and on Saturday a workshop playing with layered organza with Arlene Shawcross.

My favourite part of our meetings is the branch show and tell and Loretta and I shared our progress on the reverse applique project we started at the IPS sewing retreat the weekend before.

Loretta used solids on top and batiks on the bottom and to frame my shot cotton version, I went with the blues in the end.  It's quite subtle and I think this is definitely going to be a cushion.  We decided if I quilted it well it would be sturdy enough to survive Wilbur.  Fingers crossed - I'll let you know how I get on!

 

I showed my Big Bear, Little Bear quilt attempts and explained my design fail with this one with the paws disappearing into the busy fabric.  For some reason quite a few people didn't see bear paws at all, but hedgehogs.  I didn't get it!

 So, I showed my solids version and voila, bear paws but they seemed to like it better upside down!

I hadn't thought of the difference seeing something vertically from afar makes versus seeing something on a bed.  The design is supposed to have the petrol blue colour drape over the bed with the center green on the bottom corner of the bed and the pillows be covered under the blue too!

Having a look the following morning I still couldn't see hedgehogs and it became a running joke on the day of the workshop.  So yesterday I played around with colour and shape and can kind of see them now! What do you think - paws or hedgehogs?

Our workshop involved a piece of art created using organza and blending thread and fabrics to reflect a line or image from a piece of poetry or a story.  We all had fun reading things into the shapes and colours and no, no hedgehogs on Saturday either!

Arlene's piece that she used to demonstrate her method was based on the image of a woman in a red dress lying on the green grass on a bright sunny day!

Mine was meant to be inspired by Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, with the lines "There woods are lovely dark and deep" and " The only other sound's the sweep of easy wind and downy flake".  Trouble was, I don't think I was feeling dark and deep on the beautiful spring day that was in it!

I eventually got to evening sunset through the trees - haven't added a tree yet but there should be one on the right hand side stretching across my sunset!  Arelene told me it was very abstract and to keep the tree simple i.e. don't ruin it now!  She suggested a childlike tree but I'm thinking spooky branches!  We'll see when I get brave enough to come back to it!

This was our show and tell table at the end of the day and it was filled with beautiful colour and texture!

I loved this detail in Louise's piece.  We all swapped organza bits and Louise used some of the selvedge of a piece of yellow I had to make Daffodils and then added some bling!

These are some of the examples of Arlene's work shared with us on the day!

And the other things I found really pretty were the baskets of thread that Arlene had brought to sell.  I am totally drawn to the warm colours and did have a case of thread envy when I saw Tracey's collection shown on the bottom right.  One day, maybe!
Thank you Mid-West branch for a great sewing filled weekend!

Squaring the circle!

This past weekend, 13 of us from our branch of the Irish Patchwork Society went up to Termonfeckin, Co. Louth to a place called An Grianan (Irish for sunny place - was true for one of the days at least!).  The IPS have a sewing retreat there every two years and this was my first time going - about 80 people from around the country attended from the 8 branches and there were lots of workshops going on at the same time.  I chose a workshop, by Sandra Montgomery of Sandy's Quilts, called Circling the Square which for some reason the entire weekend I kept calling squaring the circle!

This was our show and tell at the end of the day!  Very colourful and all so very different from each other. 

Sandra's sample quilts were all done in Batiks and out of all of us in the class Louise and I were the only ones using all solids.

This is what we were attempting to achieve, perfect circles using reverse applique to allow a lighter colour through from the background and finished in a satin stitch!

I chose to use some shot cottons I had on hand.  I bought a bundle from Craftsy last year and have pulled some colours for my Technicolor Galaxy and these colours which are not really me at all were left in the bottom of a plastic tub.  The class requirements were a fat quarters each of 4 colours in both light and dark shades.  I managed to find some light and darks of orange, pink, purple and greeny blue and thought why not try something different. 

Sewing the colours together to make a light bottom and a dark top and then pinning them all within an inch of their cotton life, took quite a bit of time and lots of concentration to match the seams properly!

Then it was onto the fun bit, sewing the circles using a homemade gadget made from thumb tacks and cardboard and cutting away the top layer to reveal the brighter bottom layer underneath!

I'm not a big fan of batiks but they really shone through with this design.  I really like the brighter oranges that Frances was working with.

My more subtle project with the shot cottons surprised me with how light they were, as despite all the pins, they moved a bit.  This is as far as I got after a day and a half working on it!

We got our group photo on the steps of An Grianan and then it was off home to finish our various projects on our own.  Thank you ladies for a really fun weekend!

Probably just as well I was finishing this at home, as cutting away all the interfacing and the background fabric was something I was glad to attempt my own, so I could concentrate fully and get it all off without snipping through the top layer!  That would have been disastrous but thankfully taking my time it worked out and I got it all off leaving only about 1/8" seam all around the circles!

I did visit the shops available during the weekend, and bought some YLI variegated thread, in blue to go with my collection.  I struggle to find projects to use them with sometimes but like them in this piece.  I use aurifil 50wt in the bobbin and YLI on top and it helps somehow, to get an even look.

This is where I am now and have to decide on which colours to use as a border.  I'm leaning towards purple but could be tempted by the green/blues!  What do you think?

The project makes a wall hanging but I had intended for it to be a cushion for our new sofa.  The fabrics being so light weight has me second guessing that decision.  G thinks so much work has gone into it now that it would be shame not to enjoy it as a wall hanging.  Anyone else had any experience with Kaffe Fassett shot cottons?  Could it take the wear and tear of a cushion in a house with dogs?

If you ever have the chance to do a workshop with Sandra @ Sandy Quilts don't hesitate.  She was a great teacher and we all had great fun attempting perfect circles! 

Making 3D quilted items

I love quilts with a bit of 3d added to them, like a prairie point or raised applique but it did not occur to me to make 3d quilted items.

Gillian Travis gave our branch of the IPS (Irish Patchwork Society) a workshop on how to make her prize winning 3D flowers made from quilted pieces. You may have seen these at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham a number of years back.

Gillian has a new kit for sale and these will be the last of them. She is moving onto applique kits of Indian ladies and other fun stuff.

Included in the kit is fabric and felt to make the quilt sandwich, wire to hold the shape, buttons for the centre and a template sheet for 5 different designs.

We each used a kit on the day and it came with beautiful hand printed fabric. There were 2 options of kits, with orange and without and I couldn’t resist the gorgeous brightness of the kits with the orange included.

The fabrics are hand printed in India and when travelling there on holiday Gillian visited the workshop, made friends and worked out the basic pieces of a kit. Gillian was keen to make sure the sourcing was ethical and of a high quality.

The kits we were using are the 3rd edition and I just love the paper the wire came wrapped in. Don’t these Bollywood movies look like lots of fun?

I’m quite proud of my one flower made on the day!

There is a bit of a learning curve with this one, involving using free motion quilting, zipper foot, different types of zig-zag stitch and Gillian gave us lots of tips on the day. It was slow going and we all pretty much made 1 flower.


Now that we’ve gotten the hang of it I expect the next few would be much quicker.


Doesn't everyone's work all look so pretty together? Thank you Gillian and all the IPS peeps for such a lovely day!


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