A Blue reveal

It's reveal day over at the Tangled Textiles blog.  You can see what others are revealing today relating to the "blue" theme.    Here is mine. 

TA DA!!! A Blue Delft Tragedy! I learned some valuable lessons with this one.

I found this fabric and thought it was perfect. With a bit of fussy cutting it could work for the images on the mask.

It was tricky cutting all those tiny shapes, but here is a close up of some of the pieces that I fussy cut.

 

I had to figure out how to get the shadow on the mask and at the same time have the blue flowers on the mask show up.   I tried several different fabrics but thought I would be able to get the best result by using organza for the shadow.  I could fuse the organza, but what to use.  I experimented with Wonder Under and Misty Fuse. 

 If you look closely, you can see that the Misty Fuse piece shows hairline webbing and I didn't want to have that showing on the organza.  But how do you cut up the organza so that it doesn't fray....

with a wood burning tool. It works beautifully. But I learned that it was easier to burn it if the fusible web paper was left attached to the piece.  So now I had all the pieces for the mask, but what about the background. A sense of tiles for the background would be good. The grid created with blue satin ribbon, looked a little flat.  Some FMQ helped.  Here's a close up.

It was time to apply the mask to the background.  I fused the mask to the background and discovered that I not only had "shadow" on the mask, but some shadowing from behind too.  Look closely....

See it there on the forehead?  Oh well...I'll know better next time. 

Hey! I'm featured!

Welcome to those that have stopped by from The Needle and Thread Network.  I am thrilled to be featured on the site's Feature Fridays section.  Another good opportunity to share a little more about what I've done and where I would like to go. 

So here is a little more of what I have been doing since the year 2013 started.

I made some blocks for my local guild's community quilt.  This year the coordinator asked for predominately "dull" fabrics.  She clarified saying that she wanted no bright jewel tones.  So I chose these scraps that look like reproductions.  Here are two of the blocks that I made.  What do you think?

Just before 2012 ended, I had to come up with a quick gift for a colleague at work.  I remembered that I had a little gadget that I wanted to try.

 

I had some additional Christmas scrap fabric that I could use.  So I came up with this little number.

 

I made five of these but only finished four in time to give as gifts.  I love the way these pinwheels tesselate.

Well that's a bit of what I have been up to.  Till the next time, happy creating!!!

TST #40 - Mackenzie's heritage and signatures

Each year in the fall there is a quilting retreat held at a summer camp.  Yes, yes I know.  The summer camp is rented out in the off season, that's how we have the retreat in the fall.  Anyway, each year the teacher/quilt store owner who hosts the retreat chooses a theme for the retreat.  In 2007 she chose a heritage theme.  Little did we know what this would entail, but rather we were told to bring along what we thought was reproduction fabric.  I had never worked with reproduction fabric so this is what I brought, except for the floral print.  I borrowed that from Joyce at the retreat.

I know better now.  During the retreat we were shown samples of the styles of quilt that would have been produced during the 1800's; medallions, vertical row quilts and various individual blocks.  We were given a choice of pattern to piece, so I chose to do a medallion style quilt.  A medallion quilt begins with a central block and successive borders are added. 

Diane, the hostess had brought along some patterns that we could purchase.  I spotted this one by Kaye England and decided that it would look okay in the fabric that I brought.

I pieced the central block, continued piecing the borders until it was almost finished.  During the retreat we were then given an opportunity to share our signatures with our fellow retreaters.  Each of us wrote our signature and the date on sufficient pieces of muslin to exchange with everyone.   Then it was back to finishing off the medallion quilt.  This is it here.

What happened to the signature blocks you might ask. 

 

This is the fabric that I used for the signature blocks.  This is a better representation of reproduction fabric, but still not the best.  I chose to put the blocks into vertical rows similar to quilts from the "heritage" period.  This is a close up of my efforts,

 

and the full picture of the quilt.