At this stage, I was kind of bummed out that the swirl didn’t have any pizazz, so I echo-quilted along one side with gold rayon thread.  I only echo quilted along one side because I thought the gold might be overpowering on both sides, and I’m glad I stuck to just that one side:

I finished that spine zone by outlining it in gold thread on both sides:

Next up, I stitched my inside swags in gold, then added the solitary plumes and swirls.  The last thing I did was to add my outside plumes in turquoise rayon thread.  Here’s the whole thing finished:

…and here’s a close up of the center; it looks so intricate that I think I’d better leave the outer plumes as-is (meaning no hyperquilting) because that might take away from the intricacy of the wreath center:

I have been having so much fun with playing around with feathered wreaths this summer that I want to share the joy, so we’re putting our stencils on sale!  From now through 12:01 am 8/27/10, you’ll get a 15% discount on feathered wreath stencils (for retail and wholesale orders) if you write aug15 in the discount code box at checkout.  I’m not kidding; these really are addictive because you can put your own spin on them to make the design your own!

Once I have some time, I plan to make a large quilt using this block design but for now, I’m just making a small wall hanging because I need a border zone that I can quilt while I demo some hyperquilting at the Checker Open House next Monday. The center has a Texture Magic portion surrounded by 2 petal zones:

Of course, the appliqued areas will all be trapuntoed and here’s a shot back side of the central portion now:

I need to get this all finished this week, so I’ll post the final pictures as I get them done. But, I wanted to post about 2 fun events coming up in the next month. The first is the annual Quilting with Machines conference in Huron, Ohio next month. It runs from September 22nd to September 25th, and it’s a wonderful chance to connect with machine quilters from all over who love to machine quilt! It has something for long armers, mid armers, and even those of us who quilt on home domestic sewing machines! If you’re looking to learn about machine quilted feathers, sign up for my 2 classes, (Feathers Part 1 and Feathers Part 2), each of which will cover different topics in feather quilting. I can’t wait to check out the vendor’s mall because a lot of the things we machine quilters use just aren’t available in the average quilt shop, and this is a great way to find out about them!

Another fun event is coming up on September 11 at The Quilt Foundry in Maumee, Ohio. I’ll be doing a book signing but I’ll be giving a talk and probably a bit of a demonstration twice on that day. Call the shop at 419-893-5703 to sign up for one of the talks so you’ll be sure to get a seat…I’ll look forward to seeing you there!

I still need to hyperquilt 2 sides and bind it, but then it’s done, done, Done! I got to do a bit of dyeing outside this weekend:

…and here are some yardages drying directly on the driveway in the hot sun:

And here’s a quickie pincushion I threw together today. I started off with a 6-inch square of fabric, placed a small scrap of wool batting behind it, then I quilted one of the square wreath stencil designs in the center:

I cut away the excess batting, leaving the backside looking like this:

Then I placed a piece of silk batting behind the whole thing and outlined the original design in gold rayon thread:

I quilted the surrounding area in a low contrast thread, then quilted a back side for it and once I’d trimmed them down a bit, I sewed them together to arrive at this:

Not sure the trapunto even shows up…rats! I’m going to try this again in a different colorway with a different center design and we’ll just see whether it’s worth the time…

It’s sizzling hot and here in NC, we’re going to break 100 degrees this weekend! That means I’ll be hibernating inside and hopefully sewing in my cool sewing room. To heat up the summer even more, Patsy Thompson Designs, LTD, is offering a 20% sale off all retail sales of notions, threads, stencils, and patterns.

To take advantage of the 20% discount, just type in “summer,” (in small case letters and without the quotes), in the Discount Code box during the online checkout process. This will take off 20% from these items during checkout.

This summer sale starts immediately, and continues through 11:59 p.m. on July 30, 2010.

Click HERE to begin shopping and saving!

Here’s a closeup of some of that outer border quilting.  It’s a plume-based background fill design I call “improvisational pluming” and I went back in and did some selective hyperquilting with a solid gold rayon thread.  These photos don’t quite capture the colors, but it’s really cool looking in person:

Adding the yellow around the edges was pure genius-Thank you, Mary!  I had only used that technique in children’s quilts to add another dimension for them to play with, (you can run your finger underneath that border edge),  but I just love how it came out on this quilt!  If you’ve never tried it, it’s pretty quick and easy.  You cut a 1-inch wide strip for each of the 4 sides, then press them in half lengthwise.  Next, stitch them to 2 parallel sides with the folded side facing toward the center of the quilt, as shown below:

Next, you stitch the strips to the remaining 2 sides as below:

…and then you add your binding, just as you normally would.  Here is a closeup of a corner once the binding was added and then pinned onto the backside:

This past week was exciting for me because my online quilting friend Sarah Ann Smith wrote a wonderful review of my “Feather Adventures” book!  Thank you, Sarah!  If you want to read it, go here to find Sarah’s blog, then scroll back to the July 3, 2010 post.  You’ll want to bookmark that blog for future reference as Sarah is an incredible free motion machine quilter!  If you missed my review of her book earlier this year, you’ll definitely want to buy yourself a copy now.  It’s called “Threadwork Unraveled” and it is one incredible book for anyone interested in learning the skills for all kinds of thread work.  There are some books that you read through once and they spend most of the rest of their lives on your bookshelf.  Not so for Sarah’s book!  This is an incredible reference book, one that you’ll go back to again and again, really more like a “thread authority” kind of book-no joke!  If you’re not near a local quilt shop to flip through one, here is the link to her book on the AQS site.  And don’t be fooled into thinking this book is just about thread for machine quilting-she touches on much more than free motion machine quilting!

Now what is this, you may ask:

It’s a small quilt being readied to ship to the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative!  When I was at Spring Quilt Market, I had the honor of meeting Ami Simms, who is responsible for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative.  Thanks to her diligence, she has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Alzheimer’s research, all through people voluntarily making quilts and donating them for auction.  Mostly, these are small quilts, like the 9 x 12 in quilt above.  These don’t need to be works of art, just small quilts!  What I realized was this could be a good way to work out design issues ona  tiny scale (so you wouldn’t sacrifice a whole quilt to learn that something really wouldn’t work) AND you could be making a donation to a good cause all at the same time.  In my case, I was trying to see if an idea I had for a bird would work:

In my case, I don’t like the way my bird came out, but I’m not viewing this as a waste of my time since I found this out without ruining the large quilt I wanted to use it in.  Even more, I can send this baby off to do some good somewhere else!  On top of that, I learned a new way to hang small quilts-check out the backside of this thing:

All you have to do is place a small hanging rod between those upper corner triangles and you’re done!  You can also put triangles on the bottom if you want a way to make your quilt hang super-straight!  If you’re interested in learning more about making a donation to this worthy cause, go here.

…and here’s what the backside of a typical block looked like before I started piecing them:

And here’s what the back of the center portion looks like once the entire center has been pieced:

(Note to self-don’t forget to cut out the very center sections of the wreath batting on each block!)  Think how much easier it was to do all this when every block was just in the block stage!  Here’s the center section as it stands now:

And now I’m stumped, because the fabric I had planned to use in the border really doesn’t look right, so I’m pondering my next move on this quilt.  Don’t you just want to kick yourself when that happens and you’re rarin’ to move forward?!  Drat!

In the meantime, if you want to see some beautiful machine quilting, check out Wendy Sheppard’s blog here. Take the time to keep scrolling backwards to appreciate all of her gorgeous work!

The nice part of working on a quilt like this is that you can get a lot of the preliminary thread work done when these are just blocks.  Here’s a shot of one of the flower blocks before I’ve even begaun piecing the quilt top:

If you watched the Texture Magic videos from last fall, I changed the way I handled the edge finishing/embroidery in that inner purple block.  I did kind of a wavy sun ray kind of a design.  The flowers here have been trapuntoed, so here’s what the back side of a block looks like, again before the top has even been pieced:

I’m going to do some kind of trapunto work on the blue/yellow blocks tomorrow; I’ll post if they come out looking cool.  If not, it’s back to the drawing board…

This is a quadrant of another feathered frame design.  (Don’t worry, I’m gonna show you a picture of the whole thing, but I want to walk you through the steps first so you’ll know that you can do this!)  For the past few months, I’ve been walking around with many neat ideas in my head about different ways to frame designs using feathers, but I just haven’t had the time to stitch them out.  I finally got that chance a couple days ago and stitched out the first frame that is based on the notion of framing a wreath (or whatever else you’d want to frame) with a design that is based on circles.   This is in contrast to the feathered frame designs on the most recent DVD as they dealt with rectangular frame designs.

You start out by tracing a large circle around your wreath (or whatever you’re framing) and of course, you do this with a temporary marker.  Then you take your scallop ruler and mark the swags that will actually make up the skeleton of your frame.  I divided my circle into 8 equal swags and I did this by placing a protractor in the center of my wreath and dividing 360 degrees by 8.  This told me I needed  to place a mark on my circle every 45 degrees-these were the spots where one swag would begin and another swag would end.  Here’s step one after I’d actually stitched the skeleton for my frame:

If you look at the places where the swags intersect, you see right away that there’s much more space in the 4 corners to stitch a design than there is in the centers of the block, so I started in the corners with a large design.  Does this design look familiar?  I just traced the corner design from stencil PT24 and this is also one of the designs on stencil PT35, so it wasn’t a big deal to come up with these corner designs.  I stitched them out in turquoise rayon thread and here’s what the initial design looked like:

I used a 40 wt rayon thread by Wonderfil for those corner motifs and this was my very first experience with Wonderfil thread.  I have to say it was a very positive experience!  This is very heavy thread, so it shows up quite nicely!  There is no correlation between one thread company’s 40 wt thread and another thread company’s 40 wt thread, and this comparison of 40 wt turquoise thread by Sulky and by Wonderfil really illustrates that difference:

Doesn’t that Wonderfil look like it’s at least twice the size of the Sulky?  Wow!  Wonderfil is a Canadian company and I’m looking forward to trying out some of their other lines of thread as well.  Anyway, back to our story…I was getting jazzed up about hyperquilting those corner motifs and I couldn’t wait, so that was my next move.  Here’s a shot of the quilt on my machine bed.  (These are the moments when you’re all alone in your sewing room and you’re heart beat is starting to race with excitement as you see this first unfolding!  Isn’t it nice that we can now share these moments of solitude electronically?!)

(I should have also mentioned that I didn’t stitch the swirls when I made that first pass with turquoise thread and I added them at this stage when I did the hyperquilting-just another way to jazz things up a bit!)  Next up, I added the motifs in the block centers.  These were lifted from a portion of stencil PT27:

And in my last step, I hyperquilted the small motifs in gold thread and added the pearls inside the swags.  Here is the end product:

Boy, those pearls inside the swags really dress this baby up, don’t they?!  Now I am debating whether or not to stitch some design between the wreath and the frame.  My instinct is not to do it, but it’ll be something that I’ll mull through in my thinking over the next several weeks.

And before I forget, the winners of the Star Thread give away were Ray Janikowski and Donna Adams.  The spools of thread are in the mail, winging their ways to their new homes!  Congratulations!

It has been a very busy winter and spring and I’m happy to announce that “Free Motion Fun…With Feathers!  Volume 4″ is now available!  This DVD was really fun to make!  It’s all about feathered border designs and feathered frame designs and the cool ways that you can manipulate feathers to make a border look complex when it’s really not complex at all!  Believe it or not, this DVD is easier than the last 2 feather DVDs, so if you know how to stitch a basic freeform feather and a feather with a stitched spine, then you should be good to go with all of these designs.  Looking for a way to add a designer look to your feathered borders?  Look no further, as this DVD will show you how to do it!  Go here to watch the preview video clip and you’ll see for yourself just how much fun this new DVD is!

On top of that, we’ve also got some cool “hybrid feathered wreath” stencils available, and even better, all of these are compatible with the interchangeable center spine designs that go with our basic 12-inch feathered wreath stencil, PT5.  If you’re not sure how to use these interchangeable feathered wreath stencils, then go here to watch a short instructional video that will spell it all out for you!  Wondering what these new stencils look like?  Here they are:

Did this last one look familiar to you?  It should, because my prototype for this stencil was my entry for the Alliance for the American Quilt Auction, as shown below:

Looking for a new tote bag pattern? Then check out our Sassy Quick Tote Bag, that features a center block with a small feathered wreath:

Worried that you can’t stitch that feathered wreath? Of course you can! That block uses our 8-inch feathered wreath set with interchangeable center spine designs, so you could actually create 30 different feathered wreath designs using these 2 sets! Just think of how many different tote bags you could make for gifts, and no two bags would ever be alike! Not sure how to do it? Go here to watch a video tutorial that shows you exactly how easily it can be done!

If you can’t tell, I just LOVE to quilt feathers, and I’m hoping that between the instructional DVDs, the stencils and the tote bag pattern, I can get the rest of the world as hooked as I am!