On Cloud Nine!…and a Give Away!

…that’s how I’m feeling the past few days since the files for “Feather Adventures! Volume I” has gone to the printer.  It’s official; it’s in the can and my feathers book is being printed as we speak!  This has been a monster of a job to put together but worth every second of toil and sweat because, if I do say so myself, the book is FABULOUS, simply FABULOUS!! Do you think I’m a bit biased?!  Yup!  I am, but I am over the top excited!  I don’t have an exact date yet, but expect both the Feathers book and the Hyperquilting book to be released simultaneously and I’m guessing it will be 3-4 weeks from now, possibly a bit sooner and possibly a bit later.  I can’t wait!

On top of that, it’s sunny and warming up and spring is really here!  Spring is my favorite time of year as it’s just so great to see the world around you spring back to life…

I feel like I’m exploding with excitement, just like all the colors in this quilt!  To celebrate, I’m offering a give away of one copy of the Feathers book and one copy of the Hyperquilting book!  To be eligible, all you need to do is to leave a comment on this post telling me why you’d like a copy of whichever one interests you, and I’ll draw the winner the day the books debut!  If you’re interested in a copy of both books,  please post 2 separate comments, as I’m going to divide these comments into 2 subsections when I do the final drawing. And now that I have a bit of time on my hands, I’m going to the sewing room to whip up something FUN!

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Feathered Frames and DVD Give Away!

Isn’t this feathered frame design fabulous? I just love it and it’s one of the feathered frame designs from our next DVD. Actually, the DVD is really about feather border designs, (and most of them are actually fairly easy to do; it’s all about the magic of how you lay them out!), but I ended up throwing in 3 chapters toward the end about feathered frames just because they are kind of related and they’re really fun!  This has been a really fun DVD to work on and I’m going to end up with several really beautiful quilts that I made as I tested out designs!

I’m hoping to have some really exciting news to share pretty soon, but in the meantime, I’m going to spread the word about a great giveaway and a really fun blog!  If you haven’t been over to Kelly Jackson’s blog, now is the time to go!  She’s celebrating  the one year anniversary of her online shop, I Have a Notion, and to celebrate, she’s having a full month of giveaways!!  Right now, she’s featuring a give away of all 3 of our feathers DVDs, so if you’ve been hoping for one, zippity-do-dah your way over to Kelly’s and post a message to be entered!  If you’ve already got all 3 of those DVDs, check out her blog anyway!  It’s always upbeat and fun, and she’s great about posting news about all kinds of new quilting products and she posts great tutorials about how to use all this stuff!  If you want to keep on the lastest and greatest in the quilting world, Kelly’s is the place to go!

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Hyperquilted Swirl Wreath, New Fabric for Dyeing, and Free Downloads are Working Again!

I went back and hyperquilted that first swirl wreath:

(Click on all photos to enlarge)

I’ve just finished another one, but I’ll save that baby for another post! I wanted to spread the word on an interesting new fabric that’s great for dyeing. It’s a 50/50 bamboo/cotton blend that’s available at Joann Fabrics, but only by the bolt:

It runs $69.99 for 12 yds, but after your 40% off coupon, that’s only $3.50/yard. It takes Procian dye really well and is incredibly soft. I’ve only dyed it once, using an immersion method:

(I know, I know; not nearly as thrilling as my normal dyeing method, but that’s all I can do in the frigid environs of Northwest Ohio!) Anyway, it took the color very well:

…so I’m sure I’ll be playing around some more with this stuff. My new friend Amy, (please check out her blog here, as she’s an incredible quilter and I suspect she will be a rapidly rising star in the quilting world) did not have as rich color results with her bamboo/cotton fabric, but she’s using a liquid concentrate form of the dye and I’m wondering if that might account for some difference. Time will tell on this and I’ll report back once I’ve had more experience with it.

I updated the wordpress blog a week ago in the hopes that it would enable me to post fullsize photos again, but to no avail. As an unintended side effect, it disabled the free downloads but they are now working again. Sorry about that! In the meantime, if anyone has a solution to this new problem with wordpress not allowing full size pics to be posted , please write me! I want to show full size pictures again so stitching can be seen easily!

And I’ve got so many projects going now that my head is kind of spinning, but here’s a peak at a corner of a center block of a quilt I’m working on:

(This one’s worth clicking on to enlarge!)

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Sale and New Stencils in the Store!

(click on photos to enlarge.)

We’ve got some great new feather stencils in the store; the picture above is a corner shot of the feathered heart swag stencil stitched in an outward orientation. In this border application, you can see some “spacer designs” in between the swags themselves. Those spacer designs allow you to stitch these swag repeats into pretty much any size of border length; we have a spacer stencil that holds a variety of spacer designs of varying widths. Here’s what the above design looks like without spacers and stitched in the reverse orientation:

There is also the “plain” feathered swag:

and the feathered fleur-de-lis swag:

and here is a feathered art deco border design:

and here’s another cool feathered border design:

We’ve also got some non-border feather designs, here’s an example of one that’s centered in a border and used as a substrate from which to flow feathers:

There are more stencils than these, so check them out in the store, because ALL STENCILS ARE 10% OFF THROUGH MARCH 1ST!! To get the discount, enter “stencil10″ in the discount code box when you enter your payment information during checkout, and the discount will be deducted from the final amount at checkout.

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Ooooooh-Lah-Lah!!!!

(Click on all images to enlarge-I promise it will be worth the effort!)
Wow! Do you ever make something and then you’re just like “Wow, did I really just make that?!” I had 1 1/2 hours this morning before I needed to get in the car and make a 10 hour drive from NC to OH, and when I went to bed last night, I was hoping I’d have time to stitch out a design that had been in my head for a few months. This design looks like it would be tough to make, but honestly, it was not! I started with this as my “baseline” wreath skeleton:

Again, this was kind of a no-brainer because I kind of cheated by using our 12-inch feathered wreath stencil and then I chose that cool spine design as below:

Next, I drew a small circle that was my boundary line for the inside design. I wanted to preserve the sense that this was a feathered wreath, so I needed to make sure none of my swirls crossed that line. If you look at the next picture closely, you’ll see that inside circle I’m talking about (If you enlarge this picture the line will be obvious):

I LOVED my wreath at this point, but I have a problem with thread in that I just want to keep adding more and more of it, and there’s a part of me that was thinking I’d probably want to go back later and hyperquilt some kind of design inside the outer plumes. If I were to do that, I’d probably use the same gold rayon thread, and the gold that forms the swirls was so loud that I though it might be too much to add more gold later on. Soooo, what’s a girl to do to tone it down? I went back in and very closely echo-outlined the gold swirls with turquoise thread. In that way, the contrast between gold and purple wasn’t as stark because now the turquoise thread was laying next to the purple:

Boy, that turquoise sure makes everything look more intricate, doesn’t it?! At that point, I needed to get in that darn car and start driving, so I never did hyperquilt it, but there’s always time for that later! This wreath is part of the center block for a larger quilt that hasn’t been pieced yet. It is trapuntoed and that makes doing all this detailed stitching easier. Here is the backside at present:

It will probably be quite awhile before I get back to this quilt, but dreaming about it made that long car ride go a lot faster!

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