Try-angle Trees and Cutting Tool Clouds

Can you see I've been having fun? Imagine yourself skiing thru the fall colored trees and looking up to see the clouds forming shapes?  Perhaps you should keep your eyes on the ski slope while skiing!

Went to the Sewing  Quilting Expo at the Dulles Expo Center this weekend.   I was so fortunate to be a passenger and I wanted to get my "stitching on".  So at 8:30am Saturday realized I needed some handwork to take.  Found the Scissors sunprint in my "altered fabric" box and fused it to some felt (oh yes, lime green!) - then looked at the shape of the scissors - in the class last week, I really saw how repeating elements helps the piece and thought , hmm - applique of a scissors shape was, well, kinda blah and I don't do blah very well.

So started looking at the fabric, where the blades open there is a very nice triangle. and there is a second triangle in the opening area near the handles.  So glad I decided to open the cutting tools - the largest one is actually a tin snip from the garage.

First I wanted to be able to practice some outline sewing - for the 3 scissors left to right- running stitch balanced, running stitch with longer thread than gaps, and backstitch. I liked the backstitch best so repeated it for the top scissors.  Added triangles at bottom, at first my thoughts went to "cutting the grass" so laid them out in a grass-like, organic order.  And did some free-motion applique with YLI thread. 

Did I mention that I love quilting... Not piecing, not applique, but taking a needle and thread and scribbling all over fabric at high speeds... At quilt shows I absolutely love running the longarms and just playing!  Yesterday, an energetic vendor was talking to me while I sewed some spiky flame shapes... She asked "what are your thoughts?" in a kinda getting me to open up about my intentions to purchase (it wasn't overtly pushy, but still doing her job)..  but I heard a question about what thoughts I was having - and I answered honestly - "I'm not thinking".  There is a methodical, meditative groove I get into when machine quilting (I know, it's drudgery to some).  If I could only do one of the steps of either piecing, applique or quilting - I choose quilting!

So thanks to one friend I had time to sew in the car, thanks to my other buddy, I was given the vision of skiing  thru trees and seeing shapes in the clouds... She insisted I see these stuffed koi fish in one of the vendor booths.  AND - I do love making me some three-dee objects, and fun to see what others are doing.  In the booth I was chatting up the sales person and behold, the topic of quilting came up - shocking, huh!  She had this steering wheel - but kinda square and shaped like a very blocky capital C. And she was no sales person, she was the Gypsy Quilter herself, Lanette Edens. Liked her right off - even when I thought she was just a sales person.

Love. LOVE, L-O-V-E the tool, it' really does live up to it's name "The Fabulous Fabric Glide", the feel and motion is really close to that of the long arm and the control is amazing.  Before this tool, I would wear the white Micheal Jackson like grippy gloves - better than barehanded - but not that comfortable.  I was able to do some ridiculously tight quilting - see in a nice turquoise Robison-Anton thread "Marine Aqua" - I do love the 40 weight Super Brite Polyester - one beacuse I have it - two cause it has a nice shine and the poly is stronger than rayon so can also be used in come construction.  Note to garment sewers - never ever never never use rayon to seam a garment - top stitching is fine, but seam construction in rayon can lead to unfortunate wardrobe malfunctions. 

Thanks for letting me go off on a quilting and thread tangent!  Back to the project at hand!  Here is a needle-eye view of my Fabulous Fabric Glide - hanging right behind the machine I quilt on.

Before I did that quilting I fused on some appliques.   The second shape in the scissor was the oval handle loop - so instead of circles, I cut ovals to and cut "triangles" out of the oval flower-cog...

flower-cog-oval...
flog-val? 


My goal for this project was not to make art - but to experiment - so tried different stitching on the flogs - no two the same.  I can use this as a reference for adding handstiching to flowers. And if it was for a project I thing I would have done the same stitching inside each one - I think some variety is nice, now that I see it.  Maybe in future do a few styles of stitching - on purpose!

I love the bottom one with the V's and the single french knot... Never would have come up with this stitching pattern if I had not done the others.  And I didn't undo or go back - in the left of this photo the one with the single bar on each pedal is not my favorite, but that's the one I did that led my to the V's.



Here you see it hanging in our powder room, the walls are the same mossy green as the flogs, not yellowish as it looks here. 

And that raises two questions
Question number one
- Should I be providing "powder" if I insist on calling it a "powder room"?  Or it it BYOP?

Question number two
- What is "a scissor", singular?  The 2 handled tool is called "a pair of scissors" or a scissors, plural...

Just saw this in Wikipedia.  It's a bit odd...

"In New Orleans, some believed that putting an open pair of scissors underneath your pillow at night was a sound method for sleeping well, even if one might be cursed."

I don't recommend sleeping with scissor open or closed under your pillow!

Series-ous Fun, process, lessons and confessions!

Saturday at Deborah Boschert's class
Small Art Quilts: Designing a Series 
 
my goals for the day included:

SIMPLIFY -  spending more time sewing and less time agonizing... so when the supply list called for 6,  I brought only 9 - not 39!

SEW MORE - selected the "4 sided angular shape"as my design element (maxing my design time and maxing my time to sew, by cutting out the extra cutting time!)

HAVE FUN - fun to work at something that you enjoy - I love the handwork!

Color Scheme
I picked colors based on my inspiration fabric - FUN hand painted and hand stamped fabric I made in Lyric Kinard's Playing with Paint class through Quilt University this summer.


Background is a commercial mottled fabric that I had gelatin printed with bubble wrap. Orange is commercial print, one yellows is from my Lonni Rossi scraps by the pound grab bag, other yellow is from my first handdying, pale green is hand painted fabric, dark green is handdyed and stamped (from 12x12x12).  So I actually used 6 fat quarters - hmmm, lesson? listen to the supply list!

Look at what I found in my orphan blocks box... I think it's a sign that the 3 sided Angular Shape wants attention and I should continue to play with this color scheme!

Design
Here it is early in the design process - the  top set was nice and clean/simple but the bottom had a complicated flavor -AND for the series to be cohesive, I needed to go one way or another - AND I wanted to be able to go wild with stitching both hand and machine, so I went the simple route! 

 

I think the complicated bottom ones would be good to do on a much larger scale... ideas!

there was something very compelling in the weaving of strips and frames... I had to keep some of that in...

Can you see that this was done on my nephew's 11th birthday? and that I am one of 3 sisters?

Stitchin'
Denying my nonconformist nature, used some embroidery stitches from the class handout... But soon my nature emerged as I stitched the bars on my twin towers piece (bottom right), and stagger longer and shorter bars up the left tower.  I felt like some of my machine stitching was weedy looking so added some loopy weed heads... 

The top left started to looked like a building, so I added the top level in stitching (both machine and hand).  Later I would realize it looked more like a mission church than a home or factory...  And a dark night sky over the mission that needed a star or a few...

Added some weaving, squares, stars, bars, y's and french knots (last count was over 70 french knots before adding the  alien flowers),

Something about the bottom left one looked wrong, so I turned it upside down... hmmm  - a flag pole with 2 flags and a detail at the top?  hmm, what would Rorschach say?

I wanted to do a blanket stitch in navy blue, but didn't have it and didn't want to wait to get some, and had black dmc floss.  I like the black edge on the navy background!  Lucky I didn't have navy blue! 





reordered the quilts so that the weeds are growing up from all of the bottom 3.

Lessons and Confessions
 
Lesson 1 - free cutting is fun, takes a creative leap of faith, but it's freeing and loose.  That overall looseness is a design element in this series... 
Confession 1 - NO ROTARY CUTTER OR RULER USED IN THE CREATION OF THIS SERIES...  in fact even did free motion sewing - the feeddogs were down for all the machine stitching except the arc across the sky in the Mission Church


Lesson 2 - navy background was a comercial print and comercially printed fabric has the color laying on top, so the back is lighter and the cut edge is also
Confession 2 - I inked the edge after the blanket stitch with my favorite tools - the humble sharpie - but the fancy "clicky" one in black...

Lesson 3- hand painted fabric has a slight stiffness makes for fantastic raw edge applique if you don't want any pokeys like in the other fabrics - the light green has a very crisp edge.
Confession 3 - I don't have another confession, yet am compelled to have a balance of confessions to lessons (I guess that's my confession!)

Lesson 4 - DON'T FEAR THE REAPER, you need to prune!  Sometimes it's what you remove... I saw many times in the designing that removing a part allowed the rest of the piece to breathe.
Confession - Took photos or saved parts removed - those can feed another project.  This color scheme, loose style, simplicity is very appealing to me and it might just become a large singular piece... That's my next mission, should I chose to accept it!

Frivolous Swivelous!

A new favorite tool (especially for cutting freezer paper stencils!)


Fiskars Fingertip Swivel Detail Knife


Gotta be the swivel
Look for the purple handle - the one with the other color handle and larger blade doesn't swivel - both have the same finger loop style.





Really good for any cutting that needs smooth curving edges - as if you were writing with a pen.  A little different in how you hold it, but I find it more natural than the pen-style exacto that has a swivel head. Allows you to cut without the natural angle most tend to use when we hold a straight pen.

Oh, yes I have 2 of these.   I could tell you that it's cause they are so good that one is not enough!  Truth is when I was doing the freezer paper stencils for days 3 & 4, I couldn't find mine and was near a craft store so just bought a second one.  As you can see the first one just wanted a friend and came out of hiding! It's is good to have one in the upstairs sewing studio and the downstairs artistic annex.

I've used for freezer paper stencils, and freehand paper cutting as well... 
Is anyone using the swivel knife to cut anything else?

Please help me and you could win something fun, frivolous and super swivelous!
What do you think? What should I call my favorite tools..."favorite tools" didn't have the  flavor of Fun From A to Z!  Maybe something something:favorite tools... any ideas on what the something something could be?

1. Trusty Tools (alliteration but not super fun...)
2. Terrific Tools
3. Coolio Toolios (this might be a rap singer!)
4. Favorite Tools
5. Cool Tools 
6. Fun Favorites (doesn't actually say tool)
7. Fun Finds (same doesn't say tool)
8. ??? do you have a better idea??? please share!

Let me know in the comments section what you think- one lucky winner to be picked on day 1 of the actual month of my birth, October 1, 2012...  vote early, vote often (especially if you have a suggestion!)