Big Honkin' Needle

My local Embroidery Guild of  America (EGA) chapter (Constellation, Baltimore, Maryland) last week hosted two crazy quilt workshops by Betty Pillsbury. I was especially happy about this because I had gone to workshop Betty gave at the Adventure in Crazy Quilting retreat in Connecticut in 2011. She is good: clear instructions, interesting projects and fun. It was there we first heard her refer to using a "big honkin' needle" for embroidering with chenile thread. We used it again at the Constellation chapter workshops.

The first workshop was entitled "Motifs from Antique Crazy Quilts." Betty has a wonderful collection of antique crazy quilts from which she selected three to teach. I might have named this class "honkin' big motif" because they were, at 4x6 inches and 5x7 inches, way bigger than I have used on my quilts. After this class I will think bigger.

The first motif was a sprig of goldenrod worked in chenile on velveteen using our "big honkin' needles."

We were supposed to use silk chenile thread for this, but it was somewhat hard to find and I used rayon. It is a flat thread, whereas silk puffs out around the whole center. I like the way the rayon looks fine, but you can see the difference by looking at the lemon colored french knots in the lower center of the motif. These are in silk thread I got from a friend.

A second motif was also done on velveteen, a palette.

The flower on this is made with wired ribbon

Third was a pansy made of silk dupioni with ribbon stem and leaf.

 

I worked this on a crazy quilted 15" diameter circle I made up for use in the class.

 

This is it after the work from the second workshop entitled "Notebook Sampler." Here are the motifs made in this workshop:

A 3" flower made from silk essense fabric.

A 2 1/2" pansy  made from wired ribbon.

 

 

 

Two flowers with  needlewoven petals and two beaded dragonflies.

The green dragonfly is from a kit Betty provided.

 

 

 

Spiderweb made with metallic machine embroidery thread and 2 bullion roses.

 

These were two wonderful days of learning and fun with friends.

 



 





Two Ornaments

Solstice is here, Hanukkah is underway, Christmas eve is coming soon. Best wishes to all of you for these and other celebrations of the season.

This year I made two Christmas ornaments. The first was for my Crazy Quilt Group holiday exchange. I forgot to take a picture, but  Susan took one during the party. Here is her post on the event.
 
The second one was for my friend Laura. We exchange dogsitting, so I took some pictures of her dog Wagner while he was staying with us, printed them on silk and pieced them into the ornament.



Both ornaments were made with four inch circles pieced on interleaving paper instead of muslin to get enough stiffness to hold the form. The embellished, folded in half and put together like segments of and orange. Laura's has three segments so Wagner's picture shows well. The exchange one now belonging to Maureen has five segments. I rather like the way they turned out.



Red Orange and Apple Green

Here is an update on one of the blocks I took to Connecticut to work on during the Adventure in Crazy Quilting and Sharon Boggon's workshop. The block needs a better name than "red orange and apple green" but I haven't yet been inspired. Marmalade and Green Apples? Citrus Grove? Ummm. I showed this picture in April when I reported  on the retreat.

Folks who looked at this saw spiders in the two major things I had done  on it. I sure hadn't thought spiders when I made them. Well, I don't want this to be a spider block, so one of them had to go. The covered bead is now a flower with heart petals.

The other one, the shisha stitched grow sticker, got legs added to make it into a spider. I hope it's abstract enough so it won't freak out the spider squeamish. I used gold blending filament for the web.

 I also added some flowers a la Allie Aller from her class at the Adventure. I fused fabrics together wrong sides together, cut our circles and then snipped petals around the edge.

I added shisha mirrors to the tips of the butterfly wings and worked a few seam treatments. So here is the status at the end of June.