The Blue River Quilt, FINAL Answer!

Yesterday I went to a warehouse sale being held nearby. Arlene Blackburn, a local fabric artist, has opened an internet fabric store, and she invited the local guild members to come by on Saturday when she opened to the public for a few hours. I did. And I bought several pieces! I first selected a bundle of fat quarters by Robert Kaufman...the Elementals Collection: Nature (lily pond colorway). Then I also pulled several bolts of batiks off the shelves and got a yard of each.

When I got home, I layed my new fabrics on the cutting table to admire them...and take a picture, of course. I walked into another room to get the camera, and as I returned to the sewing room, I had to laugh! I was struck by the similarity of the colors of the wonderful new fabrics I had just brought home and the quilt I have recently finished...they were practically the same!

I am not very good at cutting out pictures, so please excuse the jagged lines! But look at the similarity between these new batik fabrics and the hand dyed fabrics of my quilt (which hangs on the sewing room wall)!



Come to think of it, I am not sure I ever shared pictures of the *final*, final quilt. I know...I *thought* I had this finished several times, but truly, NOW it is finished!



The last time I showed this, it had lots of beads in the river in several curling swirls.

Well, I wasn't happy with the look, so I scattered even MORE beads on it, until it looked like it had blue chicken pox!

Not good...





To me, the swirls and sequins in the river were over-powering the quilt...that was all I could see!



I removed most of the river's swirls as well as the scattered beads and immediately liked it better! I slowly began to add bugle beads in a more orderly pattern. I wanted to create continuity between the orderliness of the beading at the top of the quilt and what was in the river. This is the finished product:


The final result still has beads, but not so much that that is all you see!



The placement of the beads was intended to represent reflections on the water.

There is still one swirl that is more heavily beaded, but the other swirls have more bugle beads than any other type of bead and are less heavily beaded.

This is the label on the back: I named this "Shoulda Putta Frog on it"...sort of tongue-in-cheek! Over the many months that I have worked on this, one of the girls in my Monday group kept asking where the frog was...so I put one on the back. Plus, "The Blue River Quilt" sounds so boring..."Shoulda Putta Frog on it" sounds more intriguing...at least for NOW. Having just finished "Shoulda Putta Ring on it", this can be part of my "shoulda putta" series!

Of course, in years to come, this name will no make sense to anyone.

The blue river quilt (still?)

I haven't talked about the blue river quilt lately. You remember, the the art quilt I have been working on for a year and a half! I finished the quilting on it last February (2009) and began embellishing it.

First, I did some big stitches on the trees with pearle cotton.
























I hated it! So I ripped it out.





This is how the piece looked after quilting at the beginning of the embellishment stage, with only that one tree done, and even that one was later 'undone'. The colors here look odd, though!












Next I tried just stitching on ONE side of the trees and I liked that better.







I applied beading along the rays of the sun and various other places. This took months, as I generally only worked on this on Mondays, and not every Monday at that!













When I was trimming the quilt after the initial line of stitching to put on the binding, I accidently cut off a corner of the binding. Arrrgh!


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This was supposed to be a continuous binding atround this corner, not one that starts and stops! It is NOT supposed to have two halves! So I had to rip off a big section of the binding and make a new section for that corner. Fortunately, the binding was pieced from a variety of pieces anyway, so this won't be seen as a mistake.



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This is how the quilt looked in October of 2009...I was trying so hard to call it finished!

I sewed with pearle cotton...I ripped out pearle cotton.

I sewed on beads...I took off beads.

SOMETHING about it still bothered me, but I was so sick of looking at it that I just put it away and called it 'done'.

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This is the lower half of the quilt...this is the area that bothered me the most. In addition to being so much lighter in color than the majority of the background, the piecing was also 'chaotic'...seams going in all directions...as opposed to neat and orderly like the seams in the upper areas of the background. Plus, the leaves and flowers in this lower area were stylistically different from the background trees. At first, I liked that, but it later began to bother me.

I had tried scattering beads along the river bank, like flotsom and jetsom, but that didn't give me the satisfaction I hoped for!

Even the cute turtle bead was later removed.




So I decided to paint the background of the lower right section! (what?)



First I used a very watered-down solution of DynaFlow to darken the light areas a bit. Better, but not enough.

I used some colored pencils and crayons to color in the quilting, to see if I might want to REALLY do some painting...with Shiva paintstiks. I decided that, NO, that wasn't the look I was after either.

By now, it is 2010, so the label on the back that says this was finished in 2009 will certainly have to be changed!









I recently decided that the way to fix this quilt was to whack off the lower part! Now, this was a difficult decision. I have never done anything like this before and was not sure whether or not I would ruin the whole thing by doing this!

But I did it. And it wasn't too bad...not too hard! I ripped some of the binding on each side then cut the quilt off where desired...then I rebound the lower edges on each side of the 'river'. Since I didn't want binding around the river itself, I undid some of the quilting in that area so I could turn under the cut edges of the quilt and the background and slipstitch them together for a clean edge. Then I reapplied the fuzzy yarn that surrounds the river edge (also by hand).

I removed the remaining pearle cotton stitches in those upper trees and added beads instead, also beading the remaining trees that were 'beadless'.

Now all trees had beads...it made more sense.


Then I decided to add beads to the water! I beaded for about an hour and (at left) is what I had:


I hated it. I was about to rip it out when I talked myself into waiting...telling myself , "Perhaps do a little more and then you'll like it."

So I did more.

I worked on this quilt for 4 days last week...or was it 5 days? It was ALOT! But I was more pleased with the overall result at this point and was trying so hard to get it finished!

Until I began beading the river, that is!
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I had purchased several types of beads, since there was no pre-mixed packagesin the colors I needed at my local Hobby Lobby. I even got some sequins, just to jazz it up a bit!














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This is where it stands today...Monday afternoon.

I am once again NOT pleased.

I think the beading on the water is NOT good....not a good thing.

I am pretty sure I liked it better without any beads on the blue water.

I am CERTAIN that I want to remove the small, 'S' shaped cluster near the bottom...but nearly as sure of removing them all.


I am forcing myself to sleep on it.

Prince at Heart

I finished the art project I was working on. I have posted more pictures here, if you want to see them. I am calling this "Prince at Heart".

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The piece began life as a white resin carved winged-heart which was given to me to decorate. I painted it with a green wash, then another, then clear coat, brown wash, clear coat, teal wash, green wash, more green....well, you get the idea. I just kept going until it seemed 'done'. Then a final clear coat.

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But it was just a green heart...nothing special about it! So I finally decided my embellishment would be a frog. This was one of those sand-filled little things you can sometimes find in stores, but never when you are looking for them! It was originally yellow with fuscha feet...but I painted it with Dye-na-flow #820 (Emerald Green). After that dried overnight, I painted it again, this time with Lumiere #565 (Metallic Bronze), and used Lumiere #568 (Pearl White) on his belly.

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But I was sure that just paint alone wasn't gonna do it...he wasn't 'special' enough. So I pulled out the beads! Actually, I went to the store for beads... I used a 'Mahogony Mix' of Czech glass beads on his back, and used Delica "Topaz Rainbow" on his sides and nose. The beads that are scattered on the heart were from stash...also from Czech glass mixes...as is the dark red 'heart' bead on his back.

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Beading through fabric that has been painted is not easy! I had to frequently use jewelry pliers to pull the needle through the fabric. I got best results by using 2 needles...one a small beading needle and one a #7 embroidery needle. I strung beads with the long thin needle, then couched them to the frog with the embroidery needle.

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To attach the frog to the heart required drilling holes into it. I determined the placement, then drilled 4 tiny holes with a 1/16th" bit. I shaped jewelry wire pins and hand-sewed them onto the underside of the frog's legs (and hands?) then pushed the pins through the heart and coiled the wires to hold the frog tightly in place.

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Well, I didn't like the placement! He was too high on the heart. So I cut off the coils, unsewed the pins from the frog legs...made new pins and sewed them onto the legs...drilled NEW holes for the front legs, putting the back legs into the holes previously used for the front legs...better!

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But now there were extra holes in the heart. They were small, and I was ignoring them at first, then I stuck a bead on a pin and inserted it into the hole....YES! So I drilled MORE holes in the heart and added more beads to the heart, including the dangling heart bead that the frog is intent on reaching.

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This was donated to the Wings Cancer Foundation, to be sold at auction at their 'Une Grande Soiree"-- A Wine Tasting and Art Auction

Saturday, November 1

7:00pm - 10:00pm

Clark Opera Memphis Center