Vanishing Blog Posts and 2 New Projects

If you thought you saw a blog post from late last week and now you don’t, you have not gone nuts! We have just changed servers and I made that post on the morning of the change and once the change was complete, that blog post vanished off into cyber-space! I think everything has been switched over to the new server now, so I believe it is now safe to post once again!

I started a quickie wall hanging last weekend. It still isn’t finished, but it’s just such an example of how thread came dress up the most basic of shapes. Here’s a daisy that was fused and even though there is nothing “complex” about the stitching, it’s really the threadwork that gives the daisy its punch:

The flower is trapuntoed with one layer of scrap batting, so here is what the backside of this quilt top looks like:

Here is a simple leaf on another part of the wall hanging; it has 2 parts that are fused together:

…and here is that same leaf once it’s been embroidered. The inner veins have free motion embroidery around the edges in 1 thread color and the outer edge of the leaf is finished in another thread color in a simple satin stitch:

I just love how thread cranks everything up a bit. These pictures are only of the quilt TOP, so once it’s quilted, I’ll post some more and you’ll see how more thread work will add some cool dimensions!

In a completely different style, I began a new experimental quilt last weekend. This is a traditional lone star top that I bought on ebay so I could play around with quilting it. I am doing feathers out the yin-yang on this. Here’s what the first corner looks like:

If you know how to do a basic freeform feather, this is actually quite easy to do. You stitch your first feather and then place your flexible ruler so it’s emanating from between 2 plumes in what looks like a naturally flowing curve:

Trace that chalk line and then use that guideline for your next feather, trying to fill space so that feather plume edges are nearly abutting one another. See below for new blue chalkline:

Every time you finish a new feather, just place your flexible ruler on there to make a new spine guideline and just keep going!

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More Fun With Hyperquilting!

I got to mess around a bit today with thread, so I thought I’d post a couple more designs to hyperquilt. You can do these designs in one thread only and get them done in just one pass that way, but if you’re a thread lover, it’s fun to play around like this. This first design is what I call the loop-d-loop pansy. (I don’t know why, because it looks nothing like a pansy!)

This design is pretty nice just as is, but if you go back in with another color thread, you can jazz this baby up a bit:

Now here’s a close-up to give you a better look. Note that as far as the loop-d-loop part goes, you’re really not trying to stitch right on top of your previous line except where you enter and exit the flower; the rest of the time, you’re riding just along side of it:

I’m not quite as fond of this next one. This one is called the loop-d-loop rosebud and when you stitch out the “bare-bones” form, make sure you leave some space, (i.e. don’t make it as crowded of a loop-d-loop background) because you’ll need space to go back in and add some leaves. This makes the baseline design look kind of blah:

When you go back in on this one, you’re adding leaves. In this case, I just added them up close to the rosebuds, but you could add them all along the loop-d-loop if you wanted:

And here’s a close-up of this one:

I have a website link for you to see some pretty free motion quilting. Remember Brenda Gail Smith? She’s had some great tutorials on her website before. Go here to see some beautifully quilted heart leaf vines. Make sure you click on the image of her quilt to get a better view of the lovely meandering vines she made!

And I’ll leave you with an image of spring emerging…some blooming red bud trees along our driveway:

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Dropped Off the Face of the Earth…Not!

I’m alive! That virus really kicked me hard, but I’m ok, just hopelessly behind in every part of my life! I am sorry to say that I have not touched a sewing machine in about 2 weeks, and I’m now in withdrawal…a very ugly thing to witness! But, I have some pictures to share of another experimental quilt that I finished quilting awhile back, (Of course, it’s yet to be bound, but I can crop out the messy edges with photoshop!). Remember that for me, an experimental quilt is a traditional quilt top or blocks that I have purchased on ebay solely for the purpose of experimenting with quilting. Here is a shot of the whole quilt:

It’s a traditional Dresden plate pattern, so my goal was to preserve the traditional “feel” of the quilt but do some more contemporary quilting. One thing that always help maintain that traditional ambience is to throw in some feathers…you don’t have to put in many, but it will always work! In this quilt, the “middle blocks” are all feathered wreathes:

The background quilting is the curvaceous seashell pattern and it’s fascinating to me that the addition of the ever-so-slightest curve lends a subtle sense of movement to this design:

In other news, Have you seen the special edition of Cloth, Paper, Scissors called “Studios?” See below:

If you haven’t seen this yet, check it out! I haven’t even gotten halfway through, but it is sure fascinating to see how other people organize their studios! I used to think I was an organized person, but man, I have a long way to go! I kept looking for this magazine all over and couldn’t find it, so I think you may only be able to get it directly from Quilting Arts. To find out more about it, go here.

I’m back on my feet, so hopefully, I’ll be able to crank something new out in the next several days, and it promises to be full of luscious COLOR!!!!

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I’m Sick-Yick!

Don’t ya just hate being sick? I sure do! I’ve been dragging myself around for the past several days, feeling sorry for myself, and not getting much done. Sure makes me appreciate how great I feel 99% of the time! Despite being felled by a virus, I was able to finish the quilt for the 2nd pattern. It’s called “Hearts ‘N Swirls:”

This picture doesn’t do the quilting justice, so I took a tangential shot and look how cool all the textural effects from the quilting are:

That main background fabric is cotton sateen, and it has a sheen that REALLY throws off great shadows when it’s quilted. I love to do that EKG design stitching to finish the edge of an applique shape.
Here’s a closeup of one of the heart/leaf pairs in a corner, and it shows that kind of stitching off really nicely:

And here’s a closeup of the quilted heart at the base. It was kind of “lost” until I hyperquilted it with blue thread:

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Many Things

Lots of stuff going on at the Bode-Thompson household! I’ve been working up against deadlines for many things, and spent the bulk of last week at a computer keyboard writing stuff-blech! But, I got to quilt many hours this weekend to work on these 2 quilts whose patterns will be published in a couple of months. We are going to debut a line of patterns in the spring…we’re aiming at something a bit different than what’s out there now. The goal of our patterns will be to cater to the “thread enthusiast,” or the person who enjoys free motion work, (either free motion quilting and/or embroidery), and likes to try some new techniques to kind of jazz up a quilt a bit. In general, these quilts will all be relatively easy to either piece and/or appliqué via fusible appliqué, and the REAL fun will begin once that part’s over. They will all have large “blank” areas in the background for some fun quilting; I consider this to be my “playground!” The first one is called “Pansy Greetings” and it is below:

The second quilt is still being quilted, but it has a few areas of trapunto, like this “heart flower:”

(This quilt design may look familiar; I started a similar one a couple months back but was unhappy with it, so I played around with the design and made it in a nicer color way). Here’s a shot of the backside that shows the trapuntoed areas:

There are also many areas that are not trapuntoed but are free motion embroidered when it is just a top, like below:

I still have a fair amount of quilting to get done on this baby, so I’ll post more pictures as I get more done.

We had a bit of excitement here yesterday…we were trying to film a quick scene for a DVD and the goal was to simulate the aftermath of a sewing machine explosion. We have all these fog machines because we get a bit carried away at Halloween, so we set one up in my sewing room, closed the door, and proceeded to really fog up the room to make it look very smoky. Well, it got so smoky-looking that we couldn’t see anything through the camera lens, so I opened the door to the hallway to kind of clear the air a bit, never thinking that this might set off smoke alarms. Next thing we know, alarms are going off and the fire truck is on the way…man, what a wild scene it was! So, if you see that scene in a future dvd, know that all the yelling and alarms in the background were REAL! Fortunately, the fire was NOT!

And some good news for customers in the UK… you can now purchase our DVDs in your own backyard! Please visit The Cotton Patch or Rio Designs as they are now stocking our DVDs!

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