i had a booth at my local guild's annual quilt show this weekend, selling lots of books and products from c&t. it was well-attended, and all the members worked so hard to create lovely quilts to display. a gorgeous opportunity quilt was raffled off (won by a guild member) that was a result of hundreds of hours of handwork by a dedicated group of quilters.i taught a quick fabric painting class using a few basic techniques from jane davila's surface design essentials. it was a full house, about 25 women joined me in getting some paint on our hands!
i also participated in my very first quilt challenge!
we had to use two specific batik fabrics within a rose-theme. i decided to design my own wallhanging with raw-edge applique, paint, hand stitching and machine stitching. i cut out the rosebuds and the individual sepals freehand - i just tried to keep the shapes sort of organic-looking.
then i painted the individual sepals with pouring medium to make them stiff so they could remain detached from the tea-stained foundation fabric without flopping over. i also dabbed a little medium around the edges of the pink buds to prevent fraying. i used a glue stick to put each part of the rosebuds in place, then i hand-stitched the sepals to the base of each bud with a variegated green and gold thread. my friends tease me that these stitches look like aphids :-) but i just liked the texture.
i painted the stems super straight (i sort of liked how the straight lines contrasted with the curves of the buds) then sandwiched my quilt top with a thin batting and a dark brown batik backer fabric and pinned the layers together. i wanted all my machine time to do triple-duty...appliqué, decorative stitching, and quilting...all together.
i stitched alongside the stems, giving them little thorns with the thread, then i switched thread colors and stitched a random petal-ish pattern on each bud. lastly, i folded the backer fabric up toward the front to create the binding so i could machine stitch that too...i was racing against the clock to get my quilt done in time to hang with the other challenge quilts at the show!i embellished with a few leaf skeletons and that was that! overall, it measures just 10"x27" - a nice little wallhanging if i do say so myself! i'm just so slap-happy to have had the chance to hang something i made in a show...well okay, the challenge quilts were hung in the café area, separate from the real show...but it was exciting all the same!
click here to see my little video of the challenge quilt display on facebook, and click here to see pictures of the show on flickr.