2018 year-end review

Sometimes you feel time gets away from you and you didn't accomplish nearly what you wanted. Looking back through my photos of 2018, I found I accomplished quite a lot—much more than I thought... or remembered. Although I know I have numerous WIPs [work-in-progress]—note: I'm not calling them UFOs, unfinished objects—I'm pleased to say I had quite a few good finishes in 2018!

My 2018 finishes: garments and quilts.

Top Row (left to right):

• Ikat jacket: fabrics are yarn-dyed wovens and beautiful ikat from Diamond Textiles. The jacket is quilted and lined.
• Using the Scrap Crazy ruler, I made this little quilt from Lewis & Irene fabrics in time for a visit from Ben Taphouse back in March.
• My "Oh My Stars" Choo Choo Quilters Challenge quilt. English paper pieced stars using Australian Aboriginal fabrics from M&S Textiles Australia. Free-motion quilted.

Middle Row:

• Long-sleeve knit tops: I made two this year with knits from Art Gallery Fabrics.
• This is my intro photo for the September Textile Love program. I met a lot of fabulous and talented textile artists through this participation on Instagram.
• Cuddle Quilts: I made 3 for the Choo Choo Quilters community service project. This one is an improv quilt. I also quilted one for a fellow member.

Bottom Row:

• Patchwork T-shirt: Tried patchwork using knit fabrics. Much fun!
• Siena Shirt: I've made two tops from this pattern from The Sewing Workshop. Also two pairs of the Valencia pants with a pattern hack of adding lined patch pockets.
• 9 Lives top: another great pattern from The Sewing Workshop and and a fast make. I've made two tops from this pattern. Fabric shown here is a navy pintuck from Diamond Textiles with a batik collar from Majestic Batiks.

I hope your 2018 was productive and you enjoyed every stitch!

Talking "Fabric" with the Madison Station Quilters

The room was filled with nearly 70 guild members and visitors that attended my “From Field to Fabric” lecture and a trunk show at the Madison Station Quilters guild meeting last week. It was a lively evening! An enthusiastic and inquisitve group of quiltmakers and several garment sewers asked thoughtful questions about the fabric manufacturing processes as well as the fabric samples that I brought for Show and Tell.

English paper pieced hexagons with aboriginal fabrics from M&S Textiles Australia.

A Trunk Show of WIPs
What’s fun about presenting to a group of "quilty" kindred spirits is that they “get it” if you show a WIP (work in progress). I passed around a handful of English paper pieced hexagon blocks (above), two in-progress kantha embroidery pieces ...

Kantha hand emboirdery on yarn-dyed textured woven from Diamond Textiles.

and did a show and tell of four unquilted quilt tops.

Charm square quilt top combining Australian aboriginal designs from
M&S Textiles and batiks from Majestic Batiks.

Q and A
After the presentation, the Q&A part of the evening covered discussion about:

Ikat sample.

• The differences between yarn-dyed and printed fabrics,
• Ikat fabrics [from Diamond Textiles],
• Keeping a print design on grain,
• Using the “right side” or the “other right side” of a yarn-dyed fabric,
• Sewing patterns for my jackets,
• Digital fabric printing,
• Machine trapunto.

More info about my projects that illustrate these topics can be found in these blog posts:

• Australian aboriginal fabrics and EPP
• Kantha stitching
• Primitive Stars jacket with ikat: Part 1, and Part 2
• White jacket: mixing vintage and yarn-dyed fabrics 
• Decorative stitching on yarn-dyed wovens
• Travels with Ben Taphouse from Lewis and Irene

I did have two completed quilts that featured fabrics from Lewis and Irene, a UK fabric company that just established its USA division in October 2017. This little quilt has machine trapunto and mixes fabrics from Lewis and Irene, Art Gallery, and the border is an aboriginal print from M&S Textiles.

Machine trapunto "Enchanted" quilt featuring Lewis and Irene fabrics.

Fabric Samples and Feedback
Attendees were kind enough to provide feedback on their favorite fabrics from the samples that were on display. Favorites included:

• From Diamond Textiles: Woven Elements, Primitive Rustic, and Primitive Stars were the top vote-getters followed by Embossed Cottons, Kalamkari, Nikko Earth, Picket Fence. The wildly popular ikat fabrics got write-in votes!
• From M&S Textiles Australia: all the prints were well received with specific requests for Spiritual Woman, Kingfisher, Wild Bush Flower, Spirit Place, Rebirth Butterfly Spirits and Dancing Flowers.
• From Lewis and Irene: Bumbleberries, Geometrix, Lindos, and Celtic Reflections were top favorites followed closely by Water Meadow, Fairy Lights (glow-in-the-dark), and City Nights.

Thank you!
Thanks again to Susan Yell, the guild's current President for the invitation, the two lovely volunteers that modeled my jackets, the quilt angels that held up the quilts and tops, the leadership team members that swooped in to help set up and then pack up my sample bags at the end of the evening, and to everyone who came out to spend the evening talking about quilting fabrics with me. Your excitement and overwhelmingly positive reception to the yarn-dyed textured wovens and hand printed kalamkari fabrics from Diamond Textiles, the bold colorful aboriginal designs from M&S Textiles Australia, and the contemporary “sophisticated cute” fabric collections from Lewis and Irene is contagious! I am pumped with a renewed interest in creating more quilts, garments and other projects with these fabrics and I hope you are, too.

Cast your Votes
Please tell your local quilt shops [YLQS] that you are interested in these fabrics! You are the fabric influencers for the quilt shops and independent sewing centers that you support.

Primitive Stars jacket, part two—hand stitching

Detail: running stitch on jacket back.

Did you read Part One about my Primitive Stars ikat Jacket? It was about the machine stitching/quilting part of the jacket-creation process. This post is about the hand stitching—or slooooow stitching—process.

The running stitch

On the front, back and sleeve, this jacket is embellished with a mix of fabric scraps—ikat, yarn-dyed wovens and commercial cotton prints. I was following a color palette and was not concerned with the fabric type. These patches are raw edge and attached with a running stitch by hand. I guess you could identify this technique with any or all of the following terms: boro, kantha, appliqué, or quilting... depending on your point of view. 

For this hand stitching, I used Spaghetti and Fruitti [WonderFil Threads] 12 wt. cotton threads. They come in a broad range of beautiful solid and variegated colors. Thread colors were chosen to complement the color of the fabric patches and the color scheme of the jacket.

Stitching on yarn-dyed fabrics

Hand stitching is a dream with the yarn-dyed wovens! You've gotta try it. Really.

Detail: running stitches with 12 wt. cotton thread from WonderFil Threads,
 ikat, and Primitive Stars yarn-dyed wovens from Diamond Textiles.

The thread color for stitching on the cream-colored ikat is Fruitti FT17, a variegated color story of soft lavender, pale periwinkle and a subtle hint of magenta, called "Mountains." 

Jacket pocket with hand stitched decorative band.

The jacket pocket fabric is from a Riverwoods fabric collection by Janine Burke. Looks like a hand-dyed, doesn't it? It's actually a printed fabric, so it's a "hand-dyed look at an affordable price." Quilters and quilt shops—please ask me about availability of this fabric line.

This shows the hand stitches from the lining (inside). It might look like a lot of stitches, but the process is quiet, rhythmic and relaxing—and a nice break from machine quilting.

Hand stitching on jacket (lining side).

This jacket has two buttons and button loop closures. You can see the streaks of raspberry color in the variegated thread in this photo [YLI 40 wt. cotton, color 15V Vineyard].

Button loop closure.

The sleeve detail—machine and hand stitching. I like the juxtaposition!

Sleeve with ikat fabric patch.

My completed jacket. It's a little boro and a little blue.

Primitive Stars jacket with ikat and slow stitching.

Make a jacket, make a friend

And here I am at the International Quilt Market [wearing my jacket] with Maria Shell, quilt artist and newly-published author with her first book, Improv Patchwork: Dynamic Quilts made with Line and Shape. We met in the Houston airport waiting for the Super Shuttle. We both knew immediately where the other was going (wink, wink). You can usually tell someone's a quilter by the clothes they're wearing. (My ikat jacket was a dead give-away.) We struck up a conversation in the shuttle van and in no time found ourselves at the hotel.

Me with Maria Shell and my autographed copy of
her new book, "Improv Patchwork."

Make yourself an artwear jacket. Patchwork... appliqué... kantha stitching... boro with beautiful threads... whatever techniques and materials satisfy your current afflatus (creative impulse). It will start a conversation and you might make a new friend.

Primitive Stars, ikat and slow stitiching a new jacket

Primitive Stars, ikat jacket (back view).

A jacket—particularly one with a minimal number of seams and pattern pieces—presents a vacant canvas for creative stitching, surface design, and experimenting with patchwork. For fiber artists and garment makers, what better reason is there for pulling out favorite fabrics, threads and treasured scraps and making one?

For my two previous jackets (see this blog post and the photo collage in this post), I used yarn-dyed wovens. These textiles are from Diamond Textiles [don't be fooled by the thinner, copycats] and I am still captivated by the rich, textured designs and the way the threads and stitches present themselves on these fabrics.

My recent jacket finish—just in time for Fall Quilt Market, I might add—combines one of Diamond Textiles' ikats, the blue-grey colorway from the Primitive Stars collection, and a few scraps of yarn-dyed and commercial print fabrics.

Three layers
As with most of my quilted wearables, there are three layers:

• an outside fashion fabric (pieced or wholecloth),
• a middle layer (typically flannel or muslin), 
• a lining fabric, 

... that are stitched—or "quilted"—to hold the layers together. I learned this garment construction method from the Queen of Folk Art, and prolific maker of coats and jackets, Rachel Clark. This jacket has both machine and hand quilting. Here is an in-progress photo of the front right. The "white" fabric you see extending out from the edge of the fashion fabric is the middle layer of the "quilt sandwich."

Jacket front (in progress). The individual jacket pieces are
stitched and quilted and then the jacket is assembled. 

Machine quilting
The photo below is the jacket's outside showing the combination of a straight and decorative machine stitches. This process was manual and random. Sometimes I'd watch the color change in the variegated thread [40wt. from YLI] and switch to the decorative stitch to highlight the new color.

Machine quilting with straight and decorative stitches.

I do not mark the lines for quilting (who's got the time?? not I!). An advantage of using a yarn-dyed fabric is that the pattern or "print" is woven into the fabric and it's on grain. You can use the fabric's "print" as a guide for machine quilting with the walking foot.

Machine quilting (lining side).

When the season turns from summer to fall, think about sewing a jacket to wear in the cooler weather. The Houston convention center for Quilt Market was cool and a few evenings were windy and chilly once the sun went down. I was glad I had a jacket—especially one with a pocket!

Jacket front

Here is the follow-up blog post with close-ups of the hand stitching and other jacket details. Because people ask, here is the materials list for this jacket:

:: Yarn-dyed Primitive Stars blue-greyfabric [Diamond Textiles]
:: Multi-colored ikat [Diamond Textiles]
:: Fabrics from Great Wall collection [Midwest Textiles]
:: hand stitching with 12 wt. cotton Spaghetti and Fruitti thread [WonderFil Threads]
:: 40 wt. cotton variegated thread for machine stitching [YLI Threads]
:: cotton fabric for center layer
:: jacket pattern: "Raggy Jacket" by Four Corners Designs