Since January, I have decided to try some new techniques in the

area of art quilts.  Thread sketching is the one area that fascinates me.

Thread sketching involes taking a photo, making a copy, fusing on

different colored fabric pieces, and adding the detail with thread.

If you want to know more about it, check out Susan Brubaker Knapp,

over at Blue Moon River.com.  She is one amazing art quilter.

I have  a copy of her book “Point, Click, Quilt” and I am

using the examples in this book to begin my new adventure.

This whole process begins with a  picture that is blown

up. The next step involves tracing around each area of the

photo so that templates can be made from them.

I decided to try out the Agave plant and here is the tracing

that is provided in the book.  It merely needs to be enlarged

and fabrics chosen for each piece.  There are 4 different shades

of green to be chosen.  Once the fabrics are chosen, some type

of  fusible webbing must be ironed onto the wrong sides of the

fabric pieces. Steam -a-seam, Wonder Under , or Misty Fuse

are some of the fusible webbings out there.  I chose to use Misty

Fuse, as I find that the other products are too thick for quilting.

All of the stitching was completed on my longarm and even it

protested when there were triple  layers  of the fabric and Misty

Fuse to stitch through. Once this step is done, the fun can now begin.

Here is the piece with all the fabric attached and ready for the

next step: thread sketching.  Before, I forget, a heavy

stabilizer is also placed under this piece before the

thread sketching can begin.  The reason for this is due to

the fact that the fabric will bunch up if there is no

stabilizer under it to hold all that stitching.

The backing and batting are also not added just yet.

So, off to the races we go.  All the detail is added by

stitching  with different colored threads.  It is really

quite fascinating  to watch as the piece

comes to life with  each different  colored thread that is added.

Here is the finished piece.   After all the thread sketching is done,

the batting ,backing, and quilting  can now be done.  You must think

about which  areas you would like to come forward and which areas

you want to recede.  Here, I quilted around the agave spikes so that the

plant would look like it’s coming forward.  The blue sky was

quilted heavily so that the whole plant would come forward as

well.

All the pointy spikes on the plant were added with a tan

colored thread.

I think that my only beef was that I didn’t pick dark

enough colors for some spikes of the plant.  Something to

remember for the next piece.

I thoroughly enjoyed this experiment and I plan to make

more of these art quilts.  I think, in total, it took me 8-10 hours

to complete.  It is roughly 20″ x 25″so it shouldn’t take as long

as a full size quilt to begin and complete.

Here is a small baby quilt pattern, another Jenny Pedigo pattern

called Metro Twist.

She has interesting patterns but I think I

need to make this a little bigger but have no more blue fabric.

Any suggestions- a border maybe?

Don’t forget to check out Freshly Pieced.

Have a great week.

Hope that you are looking forward to Valentine’s Day and what your

special person may do for you-and you for that person.

In order to stay with the heart theme, I will show you a cute baby

quilt that I just quilted for my friend, Arlene.  She is a super piecer

and everything is always square and flat when it comes to me.

This is the quilt before I quilted it.

And here is the after shot.

Isn’t it amazing how much the quilt changes once the

stitching has been added?

I decided that I wanted to make the design more interesting

so I went with an arc shape in the middle blocks.  Swirls were

added to give it more movement.

In the blocks near the border, I merely quilted half of the design.

I used Bottom Line  thread to quilt around all the applique pieces

in the blocks. A white polyester thread was used in the white space

in the blocks and on the border areas.

For the border, I merely used the same swirl design.  The Green Fairy,

aka Judi Madsen, is  the designer of this swirl pattern.  I thought that I would

try out this freehand swirly design for myself.

In the small squares,  the quilting is more basic.  Again, I used the Bottom

Line thread, in a white color,  all of the various colored fabrics so that I

didn’t have to change thread colors alot.

I also managed to finish my Jenny Pedigo quilt that I began in the fall.

It is hard to believe that I actually sewed the top and quilted it-all in

1 year.  Yeah!!

Again, I used a curved design-I seem to really like these right now.

I did a loop de loop around the inner triangle.  Inside the inner

triangle, I decided to stitch various designs such as pebbles,

straight lines, swiggles and wobbly lines.  All in the name of

interest. On the outside of the arc, I did straight lines with a

rounded edge. It reminds me of the lines on a military jacket.

Wierd, I know.

In the blue block, I quilted straight lines in the center and

a several slightly curved lines in the grey area.  Again, even

the quilting designs came from Jenny Pedigo. She is one

talented lady.

A white polyester thread was used for the white blocks

and 2 different blue polyester thread was used for the

blue blocks. You can check Jenny out, over at Sew Kind

of Wonderful.

Don’t forget to check out Freshly Pieced as well.

Have a great week.