Time for another catch-up post, about my Decorative Stitch Applique class on Friday at Quilt Festival.   I’m on a yahoo group for Janome 6600-7700-8900 owners, and a discussion cropped up about using the decorative stitches and I realized I had yet to post this information, so here goes!

The Funky Chicken, from Sarah’s Decorative Stitch Applique class in Houston.  Right click to enlarge image.  I’ve stacked (grouped) stitches on this one.  For example, the checkerboard (in yellow upper left) is two passes of a satin stitch that has two columns of small alternating squares.  To the lower right of the green square, a scroll stitch is bracketed with scallops.  The center square is appliqued, stitched with the “V” stapes, then outlined with a bold straight stitch.  Done on a Janome 8900.

Ya know how we all have these fancy machines that do a bazillion things, and pretty much 98 percent of the time (or more) all we do is use the straight stitch and sometimes the zigzag?   Well, when I wrote my book, Threadwork Unraveled, I included a section to teach folks how to play with their fancy stitches. This is the project in the book and the regular class project.

Decorative Stitch sampler for my Decorative Stitch Class.

I teach that section as a class which was offered this year at Quilt Festival.  This year I came up with a couple new projects as class options for students. Most of the students did the usual tossed leaves project for this class, but one loved my Funky Chicken.   Here she is early in the day, filling the background with fun stitch combinations in fun colors:

This student used the same colors as my sample. We were luckily in the Janome classroom with the FABULOUS 15000 machines. I’ve never been a fan of computer-screen sewing machine models, as I prefer visual knobs and buttons. Well, let me tell that has changed! I have severe sewing machine lust for one of these babies! And they have even more (!!!) stitches than the already fabulous 8900!

Other students put their own spin on the leaves:

A student is making sample blocks with decorative stitches.  This is a great way to test out pattern combinations–here she has a practice square to toss out and her “real” piece on the left.  If you have a practice square, that means you don’t have to pick out the stitches if you don’t like them!

Close up of decorative stitching on an aspen leaf.

This student tried a very bold, wide multi-stitch zigzag.  You can see this is her practice bit–see how she has tested the appearance of various stitches in the strip on the right?

I made a smaller (about 9 inches square) quiltlet with the sampler leaf and the background stitching. If you right click on this image, you can see more detail. Notice how I layered up stitches to applique the green patch and how I used a decorative stitch on the binding. On the latter, I used matching thread to machine stitch down the binding, then went over that with a decorative stitch.

And a happy student with her nearly-done funky chicken:

Thank you, Barb Brown of Colorado, for taking my class! I love your chicken!

The day ended with one of my favorite things at Festival:  FRIENDS!  This evening was the Dinner@8 artists.  Jamie Fingal and Leslie Tucker Jenison curate an exhibit each year for several years now, and I am thrilled to have been both invited to submit pieces and accepted in the exhibit!   My orca quilt, seen in earlier blogposts on Festival 2013, was in this year’s Exquisite Moment exhibit.  Here a bunch of us who were at Festival enjoy dinner and friendship and art!

One of the two tables of folks in the Dinner@8 exhibit. Leslie is at the head of the table, next to Diane Rusin Doran (in pink), Susan Brubaker Knapp (glasses) and Lyric Kinard

And too much fun not to include, Susan and I taking pictures of each other taking pictures!

If it was Tuesday, that meant I was teaching Tame Fussy, Fiddly Threads! As always, the students were brilliant!

Tuesday is the “down” day between Market (the trade show, which is only open to industry professionals, not the general public, ends on Monday) and Festival (which opens with a Preview night on Wednesday evening, then is open Thursday-Sunday).  Folks who attend Market often stay to take a class, and folks who attend Festival come early so they can take classes, then be free to enjoy the show and vendors on Thursday.  This year, I got to teach one of my favorite classes, Tame Fussy, Fiddly Threads, which is all about using metallics, holographics, and heavy threads (the kind that go through the needle, not bobbin work).

A student plays with heavy 30-wt So Fine thread from Superior Threads early in the day.

Since so many of my classes are fusing, I thought I’d mix it up when I formulated this class.  Instead, we make a stencil out of freezer paper and paint with Lumiere and ProFab textile paints.  Students can use my model or do their own thing (which I LOVE when they do that!).

This student chose gingko leaves pointing away from the center on the north-south/east-west axes. She then penciled in quilting guidelines on the black background.

In the supply list, I suggest a black background fabric.  I love this small black and charcoal check!  Her quilting is great…love the nestled-in quilted-only leaf next to the stenciled leaf, as well as the shading on her leaves, and how she alternated painted and not in the spray of leaves on the right.

This student was having fun!  Her background of black and gold fabric is somewhat visually busy, so she is wise to concentrate her stitching on the painted leaves as the print could obscure the lovely stitching.

Then in mid-morning a fun surprise!  The best thing about Festival is seeing folks you know from (mostly) the internet…the quilts are great too, but the quilters are the bestest!

Luana Rubin, founder with her husband Paul of eQuilter, was at Festival and popped in to the classroom to say hi! We are both members of a small online group–there are not so many of us and we are VERY tight! We respect everyone’s privacy closely, so we can share and be sure that we will support each other and keep mum. I also got to see Luana AND her daughter Sophie later on the show floor (photo in a future post).

Practicing on a sample sandwich before working on the stenciled piece. (Note her shirt, from Lopez Island Resort; Lopez is the island next door to San Juan Island where I used to live.  I swear everyone on the planet has either been to the islands or knows someone who lives or lived there!)

Another set of gingko leaves, this time on the diagonals, partially quilted.

And the same leaves at the end of class. Fabulous!

Oak leaves are popular, too, and easy to draw! notice how she varied the thread for the leaves.  Would love to see how she quilts the acorns; we talked about doing a dense zigzaggy thing for the caps!

Love the quilted border!

A happy student–the maker of those wonderful gingkos– in a happy and talented classroom. We got to use the Janome 9900s in class, which is similar to the machine I use at home. FAB!

And those glorious gingkos from above at the end of the day. LOVE THIS!

My next Houston post will share quilt pics, then I’ll do more on classes I taught, then more quilts, then even MORE quilts!

Congratulations to Gail Myrodhosky who was number 42 in the comments on my Grand Finale Giveaway to celebrate the release of my DVD workshop, Art Quilt Design From Photo to Threadwork.

To order, see below.

Here’s what the random number generator told me–I just think these things are so cool!

Random.org is a random number generator (found by Google, thank you Google)

Thank you to all of you for reading, commenting, participating in the giveaway!  Thank you to all the bloggers who participated, and to Quilting Arts/Interweave, Mistyfuse and Havel’s Scissors for donating prizes!   Now…on to blogging about more art, quilt and family life!

And for those of you wh o didn’t win (I’m sorry!  I wish I could have a copy for each of you!), visit my Store page here to order the DVD,  or to order either the DVD or a digital download, visit Quilting Arts’ Interweave Store, here.

Lookit what arrived in the mail today!   My September/October issue of Machine Quilting Unlimited, with my Metallic Threads article mentioned ON THE COVER!  I’m thrilled with the layout and how the article looks and reads, and hope you will be too.  You can find MQU at Barnes and Nobles (on Sept. 1) as well as order this and back issues online, here.

Machine Quilting Unlimited…notice the Metallic Threads on the left, that’s my article! WOOT!

I LOVE Metallic threads, and once you learn a few basics it really isn’t difficult to use at all!   My book, ThreadWork Unraveled, talks all about threads including metallics, but for the skinny on just the metallics, it’s covered in this six-page (!!!) article.

The opening spread on the Metallic thread article. The golden eagle quilt on the left, 13 x 13 inches, is a wholecloth quilt using one of my murky “background / forest floor” hand-dyes.

I was thrilled that my buddy Jim VanderNoot, who lives in Pennsylvania but will be returning to the best place on Earth (well OK, the are other really great places too, but Maine ROCKS) when he retires in a few years (or sooner we hope in the local guild…Jim is a welcome addition!), let me use his “Celebrate!” quilt for the article.  Jim’s a fabulous quilter, so I can’t wait until he and his wife get to move north.  Thanks, Jim!

Here’s the last page of the article with Jim VanderNoot’s quilt on the top–love his sense of whimsy and UBER LOVE his quilting. That’s my Garuda Dances Under the Ocean Moon on the bottom, made with Princess Mirah Bali batik fabrics.

AND…drum roll for thorough readers…. MQU has a “Web Extra,” a free PDF download of my 2008 article on sewing machine needles.  Click here to visit MQU’s Web Extras page and find the link.

I’ve finally finished the major house chores–well, except for painting ALL the trim on the garage–done, so hope to get back to a regular blogging schedule soon!   In the meantime, hope you can lay your hands on a copy of this magazine and enjoy this and the other great articles.  MQU is  one of those magazines that I read cover to cover AND keep all the back issues!   Thrilled to be able to write for them again.

P.S.  And one benefit to this article… in the past I had avoided bobbin work like the plague.  But I thought it would be good to include bobbin work in the article.  Guess what… I now LOVE using the Razzle Dazzle thread–I figured out a way to use it and still fill my need to SEE what I’m doing with something that needs to be worked upside-down!   So add one more technique to my arsenal…and a few more spools of thread to my stash.

Eggs on White…an exercise in learning to SEE.

A few years ago, one of our younger son’s karate teachers told me about a drawing exercise he learned from Jaime Wyeth (!!!!).  Place a white egg on a piece of white paper and then draw it.  By eliminating all color, the exercise helps you REALLY focus on where the shadows are, reflected light, shape.  So last year about this time, I tried it in my sketchbook.  First I used pencil, but then wondered what it would be like in watercolors (over which I do not have expert control, ahem), pen, and so on.  I tried the pen because before the advent of photography, pictures in newspapers and books were often engravings, rendered by using lines, dots, cross-hatching to create light, dark, shading and shape.  Finally (duh, Sarah) it occurred to me that the same exercise would be well applied to thread and cloth.

• And a note:  by the time you get to the end of this post (which is long…sorry!), I can just hear many of you saying “I could NEVER draw like that.”  Well, neither could I when I began.  I’ve learned, and so can you, you just need to try.  I’ve learned to teach myself drawing, learned to SEE.  I recommend Betty Edwards’ The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain very highly.

A whole lot of our thread-coloring, quilting with thread, thread-sketching–whatever you want to call it, is achieved the same way artists used pen and ink in the days of yore. You use the direction of the stitching to create a contour, like on a hiker’s contour map of the terrain.  And you can use different colors or use the same color applied more densely to create variations in value–the range of color from light to dark.

One of my first efforts at eggs, using a water-soluble gray ink pen.

When I started playing around, of course I didn’t want to muck up the expensive watercolor paper, so I did a few test-sketches on copy paper:

Practicing directions and types of line to create shading for the eggs. The S and XS are reminders about the size tip on the pen I used, a Pitt permanent black ink similar to the Pigma Microns.  I have found that my Pigma pens just dry out too quickly, and that the Pitt pens work as well on cloth and seem to last longer for me.

Then I tried by drawing in pencil first.  In this photo, I’ve included the eggs on white paper in the background and my ink sketch in the foreground:

The eggs and the ink drawing, which I did to simulate on paper what I might do in cloth.  This sketch was done relatively quickly, so I’m pleased that it gives a decent rendition without taking eons to do it.  If you look carefully at the egg on the right, look at the  left side.  There is a triangular wedge of shadow BUT at the bottom, *under* the edge of the egg, it actually becomes a brighter / lighter gray from light being reflected and bounced up off the white paper!  Whooda thunk it?  And just in front of the tip of that egg…notice that glow of white *under* the egg?   It’s amazing what you can see when you really start LOOKING at something!

Next, a comparison using three different media:

From top to bottom, the eggs done in pencil, watercolor and ink.

Then this year I signed up to teach at Friday Sampler in Houston; think of this as speed dating for quilters!  About 20 teachers are in a ginormous room at the Houston convention center, each with their own Station (one or two tables).  The teacher does brief (5-10 minute) presentations…same one over and over.  The students/participants can come into the room and move from station to station at will to see what each teacher has to offer.  I’ll be talking about Thread-Coloring, so I thought it would be the ideal time to do up some new samples to teach how to see light and dark, light and shade.

This sample shows the lines I drew in blue pen (quilted in a similar blue since over time those blue pens can fade out with humidity!), followed by three variations in quilting them.  The top two quilted ones are stitched with ONE color of gray thread (the new Magnifico poly from Superior Threads, and it is magnifico!).  The bottom set of eggs is quilted with white and three shades of gray (light, medium, dark). You’ll notice two sets of cast shadows…that is because there was light coming from two directions:  the electric light and the window.

All four versions in thread: the blue is to represent the markings I put on the quilt. The second set of eggs is quilted with cross-hatching of sorts using one color of gray thread. The third set of eggs is quilted with a scribble using one color of gray thread, and the bottom/fourth set of eggs is quilted with the same scribble but using three shades of gray. For all three of the quilted sets I kept the way I stitched the shadows consistent to make comparisons easier.

Just as I did with my paper sketches, I did some practice runs on an old warm-up quilting sandwich:

It’s good to try out various options on a scrap quilt sandwich before working on the real thing.

I’m not thrilled with the cross-hatch stitching I did on the final sample…those ovals on the top just don’t do it for me.  I would not use this quilting on an actual art quilt…that’s the benefit of test-driving quilt designs on scraps and samples.  I really liked the way the scribble versions turned out, though!  Here are some close-up photos so you can see better:

The “marked” (blue) design and the first of the quilted eggs.

The bottom two quilted sets of eggs.