McTavishing Revisited

A while back I was asked to quilt a piece for Laser Cut Quilts, a wholesale only laser cutting company. I rarely take in pieces for me to quilt for others, but occasionally I am persuaded and I knew this piece would be a nice one to show some swirly, whirly, McTavishing. I was told I could take my time, but I did leave it be for longer than I should have. So I've been stitching away at it and if you follow me on Instagram or maybe Facebook, you've likely seen some of my progress.

First I outlined all the applique with FilTec's monofilament thread, Essence. This clear, super fine nylon thread is soft, flexible, and works great. It has been mistaken for blond hair here before. If I accidentally popped onto the applique, you can't tell and it allowed me to travel over some of the applique to get to other small areas of background.  I did a video of part of this step.

This video may look familiar, Janome shared it out in an email last month. Then I switched to Aurifil 50 weight thread in white as I wanted the quilting to give texture and movement, but not take away from the intricate applique. Even though all the applique was done by someone else, I can really appreciate the time saved by using this laser cut kit. The detail boggles my mind!

I decided that I wanted to mimic the pine branches (spruce? I dunno.) with some of my quilting. With the intricacies of the applique, I knew I was either going to have to quilt loosely enough to not quilt into every nook and cranny, or I'd have to quilt densely to get into all the little spots. Since it's a wall hanging, I had no qualms about going dense.

I used my trusty purple pen of disappearing ink to mark wedges of three lines. The wedges represented the branch stem down the center and the outer edges of my 'branch.' My branches had to be a little bigger than the appliqued version or I would have had to microquilt in order for them to stand out from the background.

Then it was time to swish and shwoosh my way all over the place with McTavishing. The design is named after Karen McTavish and I did a month-long series on it back in 2014. McTavishing Monday Series

Check out the series to learn more about this design. Look at the texture! I still struggle with my McTavishing a bit, but it's getting there.

I've just got a few more tiny bits left. Small spots that are enclosed with appliqued pine needles, so there's a lot of stops and starts. Hopefully, it will be done this weekend and I'll share a tip I use when I need to move between small parts of quilting without having to break thread each time I stop and bring up the bobbin thread each time I start.

Have you done any laser cut quilt kits before? I know many shops use them in their Row by Row kits.

Art and Quilting Inspiration from the Book

Even though I've been trying to set some boundaries for myself when it comes to the times I write blog posts and other "work" type stuff (and I use 'work' pretty loosely here), I could not wait to share what I found today!

There are two things that are part of my quilting 'style': ruler work and using text in my quilts. Some of my quilts are inspired by my faith and I love using text with these.

So when a gal from church showed me several pics of 'Bible Journaling' that she had found on Pinterest, I was totally into it. Journaling in a bible or in a separate journal is nothing new, but apparently, some people are combining text and illustrations together in a special bible. Since I firmly believe that creativity comes from the Creator, I just love this! (Whether you are of the Christian faith or not, I believe we possess creativity as part of the creation, however you believe or don't believe.)

Here's a great discussion from Jann Gray about how she uses Bible journaling. She's got some beautiful examples and talks about the how and whys of her practice, including her reverence for the Word in doing it.

I wish I had a picture to show you directly on my blog, but I didn't have time to ask permission to use someone else's pictures here. I certainly could have easily scraped a picture from somewhere, but that's bad blog etiquette you know.

You can see a ton of beautiful and inspiring pages by searching Pinterest for  "Journaling Bible". I have also pinned quite a few images to my Good Words board on Pinterest.



I hope it doesn't seem crass to share these affiliate links above when it comes to talking about the bible, but "the worker is worthy of his wages" perhaps and these are relevant to the post. I have had the two books on the left for several years and love them. I think one of these journaling bibles is in my future too. This one is a little lighter than my current study bible, which I love, but I find that reading through a new bible after using a well-worn and highlighted version for a while helps me to learn anew some of the old and timeless truths. I hope the pages are thicker than the average bible paper!

I am looking forward to then taking some inspiration from these pages and translating them into quilts. Painted, appliqued, stitched, however I am led to create them.

Now back to some family time and Sunday rest.

Hugs to you!

Working With Text Part 1

The following tutorial will show how I use Microsoft Word to make patterns for words and text that I want to use in my free motion quilting projects. This is useful for many different crafting and sewing purposes. Please do not think I'm a tech-y genius, since I still get confused by a lot of this computer stuff. Also keep in mind that when it comes to computer programs there's usually more than one way to do the same thing and there's usually variations in versions of the software. I'm sure some of you may have other ways to do this or better programs, but this is a basic tutorial with basic/commonly available programs.

I am using Word 2013 which comes with my Office 365 subscription. This is the cloud-based version of MS Office. This should still be easily done in other versions of Word. Part 1 will show how to use the program to get your words to look how you want them. Part 2 will attempt to show how to print out even larger versions of this process, and I may do a final part on how to take the words from paper to fabric.

First open a new Word document. Type Enter the words you want. (Can we still call it typing?) Go ahead and increase the size of the font to something easier to see (anywhere from 80-100). Don't worry about orientation, final size, or word placement at this point. Highlight the text and click on the "Text Effects and Typography" button indicated by the orange arrow.

This drops down the following choices below:

Click the 'A' indicated by the orange arrow above. If using a different version, you're looking for something with an outline and white fill. This selection will give you a blue outline. We'll change that after the next step.

Since this choice will give the text a 'shadow', you want to click Shadow, then No Shadow as indicated by the arrows below. Right above the Shadow selection, it says Outline with a line of color under it. Click there to change the outline color to black for better visibility.

Now it's time for the fun of trying out fonts. There's a ton, and they don't all look great when made into large letters. The orange arrows indicate how to change the font from the drop down list. I chose Harrington for this example, which is a bit too fiddly for most fabric projects. Imagine cutting out that g!

Now it's time to fine tune the size and this gets less exact with my method. Part 2 will deal with how to print your words onto multiple pages (posterizing or tiling pages) since I haven't figured out how (or if I can) do it in Word. This will get the letters to the size you want them and in the word grouping you want. But I use different programs to do this with, hence Part 2.

The orange arrow below shows where you can change the size of the font. You can type enter in a number or click multiple times on the A with the upwards pointing triangle just to the right to increase the size. The smaller A with the downward pointing triangle will decrease the font size. Make sure you have the entire text selected by highlighting it all (click and drag).

Now's the time to change the page orientation to landscape if desired (this is under the page layout tab) and to center the text on the page. If the phrase doesn't need to be very large, it may all fit on one sheet of paper and all is well. If you want it to be larger, without having to posterize (part 2), print out the phrase at a smaller size but spaced and centered/justified in the layout you want. This sheet will serve as a placement guide.

Then enlarge the text (maximum size for this method is one full letter per page) to the desired size. Print the letters out and proceed with your project using the letters individually and using the smaller sized sheet of text as a placement guide.

Whew! That's enough for now. You can't imagine how many screen shots I took, how many times I re-sized them and then added arrows for this tutorial. I even had to tweak the layout of the blog so I could show enough of the screen shots at a readable size.

Please ask questions in the comments below and also let me know if the blog looks good on your screens. A shop customer mentioned visiting my blog the other day and said my blog must be pretty new since there wasn't much on it. I was floored. Maybe there are compatibility issues for those using smaller devices to view the blog? I have recently bought www(dot)freemotionquiltingadventures.com and it is totally blank at this point, but she would have said it was blank if she visited there.

By the way, there are some great online shopping deals to be had right now and through this week. Check my side bar for great deals.

Applique at the Pow Wow

Last Saturday, we headed off to the annual Monacan Indian Pow Wow near Elon, Virginia. The Monacan Indians are a relatively small group in central Virginia and are working towards being officially recognized by the government. We have friends in the tribe who were there and it was great to watch their daughter dance and to look at all the clothing the dancers wore.

I imagine the man on the left is what most think of when we hear American Indian, but look at the lovely young lady in the middle. The dress of the participants ran a wide gamut from very traditional (referred by the announcer as old-school) with no metal or non-natural items, to very modern-day materials, and everything in-between.

The young shirtless man in the black hat and glasses was a very energetic dancer. The men definitely get to have more variety in the dancing than the women, which for the most part was a very demure rhythmic step shuffle.

But what caught the eye of this quilter was all the applique! As quilters, we have a tendency to forget that stitching one material to another for decorative purposes is used for a wealth of beautiful items and purposes besides quilts.

The above isn't pieced, purely applique. It sure was pretty during the women's Butterfly Dance, which involved much turning with outstretched arms and was the highlight of the ladies' dancing that we saw.

From what the announcer was saying, there were more tribes and people groups present than just the Monacans, encompassing a large portion of the Mid-Atlantic area of the USA.

I wanted to get a better shot of this woman's skirt, but she wasn't too pleased with me. So I took this shot and moved on. I had accidentally asked if I could take a picture of her costume. She took offense at the word costume, for which I apologized profusely. I didn't ask what I should call it; traditional dress? Regalia?

This girl was absolutely beautiful! Look at those large curvy designs on her cape.  Most of the applique on the garments were zig zagged down, sometimes with a contrasting satin stitch.

Even the men had traditional designs in applique. There were so many beautiful designs that I just might have to add a Monacan inspired quilt to my list of future projects!

I hope you enjoyed these photos! It was a beautiful day for the event too. It has a reputation for being either incredibly hot or raining.

Today starts the voting for viewers choice over at the Blogger's Quilt Festival. You can vote for your favorites among several categories. I recognized Karen's quilt among the pieces nominated for Viewer's Choice. There are so many gorgeous quilts to see and wonderful blogs to visit. Though not in the running for Viewer's Choice, I have one quilt entered and I know several readers of my blog do too!