Cardinal

Now that my LQS has the classes posted for the spring, I can show you the cardinal art quilt I will be teaching.

I have a thing about birds, especially cardinals. This is ironic given that I don’t think I have ever seen a cardinal in real life, but that does not stop me from liking them.

This year, I decided to offer 3 classes that go from choosing a subject, to painting, to embellishing,  and to quilting the piece. I chose the cardinal as my subject.

Without further ado, here is the completed piece! This terrific photo is by Travis Lowe. His photography is wonderful and his bird photos are my favourites.

    

Thread trees made using a zigzag stitch. Tension is set at 9 on my Bernina and the bobbin tension is very, very loose. This pulls the dark brown to the surface.

White puffy paint with sparkly embossing powder added makes the snow.

Hand dyed ice blue background pulled from my stash.

The cardinal itself is all thread. Beak left untouched after painting it except for a faint pale grey to delineate the upper and lower beak.

       You can click on any ofthe pics to see a larger image.

I love this guys fat belly. 

     

Last night (or this morning) at 3am I was done all 4 class samples, had printed out the the supply list handouts, and design boards done. I set my alarm for 8am in case I slept in (I wish) and was at the store by 8:30.

And this morning I even made 3 pots of soup! I pot of ham and split pea and 2 pots of chicken broth.

Then I loafed around and watched all of season 4 of Merlin. And ate soup. Sigh…. It was good to be me today.  haha.

Welcome 2013

 2012 was a great year for me. I am essentially a loner kind of gal but I pushed myself out of my comfort zone and made 2 new friends. I also connected online with a like minded thread painter and have been exploring this new friendship as well. My husband and I have been making serious lifestyle decisions and our joint New Years resolution is to get active and fit.
Today I downloaded the Quilting Art In Stiches  Vol. 9 and something Eileen Lauterborn noted there resonated with me. She wrote: “The more artistic decisions you make by yourself, the stronger your ability as an artist will become.” 

What good timing this observation is! I am working on my lesson plans for this spring, and as always, I struggle with them. I try to keep up with trends and try all new techniques that I encounter. I then share my insights with like minded folks who attend my classes. I do this only because there is no organization or guild in my community that shares my interest in alternative art quilts and mixed media. What a surprise it is when I teach these classes and am told that they would not have thought to do a specific technique the way I do it or that they cannot ‘think’ their way out of a specific problem.  I am going to gently push them to make their own decisions and remember Eileen Lauterborn's quote. Heck, I may even make this my new mantra for classes..

This year I am teaching a 3 part class—creating a scene with paint, then thread, then embellishments. My final class is a stand alone advanced thread painting. No newbies, so those advanced quilters will be able to work on their skills.

Here is a teaser of the 3 part class. “-)   It is a large piece and is taking a fair amount of time. But its coming along.. And I have had to make a lot of decisions, so I guess I am on the road to becoming an artist. hehe

This weekend I’ll show you the completed piece!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

I am still on "holidays" in Alberta, so I am spending lots of time with family. Hope you all have had an opportunity to do the same..

See you in the new year!

My Latest Thread Painting Class

Last Friday was my Thread Painting class. The weather did not help--it was minus 34 but I still had a lady drive 1.5 hours to get into town for the class! There were the usual sick people and those with commitments  and the class was a manageable 6 people.
One of the ladies brought in her mom's beautiful clamshell thread holder. I am absolutely in love with this thing. 

 

Isn't it fabulous?! 
And she also brought in this thread piece that a friend of her mom's had made in the 50's. It is in a very elaborate frame and I could not get a good picture without glare, but here it is. Trust me, it is quite spectacular. 

The ladies seemed to have a good time. At least I hope they did. I tend to pack a lot in the 4 hours we are together and they are such good sports. I am always amazed at their abilities..
    
In the end, I decided that a simple tree branch image would be the best for practice, but I threw in 3 of the my old class pieces just in case people didn't want the branches. Naturally, 4 of the 5 wanted the northern lights and trees and they had to fight over the 3 samples. Doesn't it always go like this?!  lol
                 
The trees and northern lights one is not the picture I used. I don't have a picture of the actual piece, so I stole this off the internet to show you something like the  of the northern lights and trees picture that was used in class. 
Then time almost got away from me! I had to hurry them along to the final piece, but I am happy to say that everyone who had a working machine finished. Whew! 

But in the rush to get the piece done, I didn't have time for photos. Here is a re-enactment of how everyone felt by the end of class...

It’s Cold!

Not much to say as I ramp up to my class on Friday, but I wanted to say it is really, really cold here! This week we have averaged minus 30 during the day that’s minus 22 F for my American peeps..

I just got a new phone today and took a few pictures--and it looks like I take way better pictures with my cell phone than I do with my expensive camera!  LOL

    
Trees on the same street, just taken at different times of the day—noon and 5pm.

One of the nice things about Whitehorse, Yukon is that in winter it gets cold but there is rarely ever any wind and this is the driest place on earth--you need moisturizer for your moisturizer!  When I was in University in Vancouver, BC, I found it much colder there because of the damp and wind even though they rarely got into the negative temperatures.

When it is perpetually dark, it is a struggle to come to work in the dark and go home in the dark, and one must work at staying engaged and optimistic throughout the winter.
    
One of the great things that I love about winter is the look of hoarfrost on the trees at this time of year. I MUST do a thread painting with this subject…

And since I mentioned it, the phone I just got is the Samsung Galaxy Note 2. So far, I love it. These bigger phones are now called a “phablet”—and I have to agree it fits the bill pretty closely. Awesome toy for this geek girl..

Now back to my class prep!

Is this thread painting?

I have a class this Friday for intro to thread painting. I have taught this enough times in the past that I am looking for new material that will be the basis of the practice section of the class and something fun. I usually have students practice writing their names, making a flower, following a grid that I provide and tracing ‘something’.
Today I was reading the Aug/Sept Stitch Magazine  (the British Publication with the Embroidery Guild) and HAD to try the project called ‘Stepping Out in Style”.
  
It was like playing with dolls all over again. LOL

Make a few templates.

I have a TON of fabrics that I apply fusible web to and put in this large container. Then when I need something, I just grab fabric from here.. All of the fabric I used was obtained from this container.

The fabric I chose.

 
Attached the fabric to a drawing I did on muslin.Put it in a hoop and start free motion sewing. Next time I would use a stabilizer as the facial features got a little squished.

All finished and cut out carefully.

I just couldn’t resist adding her to a bunch of projects I have laying around.  Hahahaha.
            
         

Do you think my class might want to do something like this?? I usually make have them draw different flowers. I don't know about this...

Felted Landscapes

Hello, my name is Dahn and I am a hoarder. Well, not like the lady who keeps her dead cats stacked like pressed flowers, but I appear to be a memory card hoarder. Today I was looking for a specific item in one of my purses and I looked through a lot of satchels, quilted bags, Ikea plastic bags (my all time favourite things) and purses. I found seventeen memory sticks. Seven. Teen.
But it’s funny what you find when you clean out your memory cards. I really should be getting my lesson plan together for my thread painting class next Friday, but I was fascinated to see what was on these cards. I have only seen half of them, and I had forgotten most the pictures I had taken.
So far the ones that stand out are these ones—felted landscapes I made for a class a couple of years ago.

These involve simple free motion quilting on the snow piece and no stitching on the summer piece. If I remember correctly, on the summer piece I was trying to demonstrate that you could hand felt a lot of fabrics. Here there is a piece of a yellow and white rayon shirt, some threads and a curled up piece of painted cheesecloth. Nothing fancy, but I remember how much fun this class was to do and how wonderful the student’s work was.
Then I saw the only piece of hand work I ever did that was totally hand work. It is about 4” x 4” and I remember that I did this piece with my non dominant hand after getting carpel tunnel surgery!
I usually don’t like to make things that don’t look like anything, but I really like the piece for some reason..

Last in this long, rambling post I fixed the truck painting a bit and here it is. First, the original piece:

And here is the tweaked picture. I don’t think its done yet, but its getting there.. This is a little brighter than the original, but not by much.

I’m off to see what else is on these memory sticks. They sure are bringing back memories!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am back from Vegas and was not arrested, assaulted or robbed, so it was a pretty boring trip.

Here is a big happy thanksgiving wish to all of my many  both of my American blog friends. Gobble, gobble!

Viva Las Vegas!

Well we are off! Hubby and I are going to Vegas for the first time tomorrow.

I hope this is me:

And not this:

But what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, so you may never hear about it..  ha!

See you all in a week or so.

Red work

In my post yesterday <<ahem>> I said I would show some of my Red work. I actually hate, loathe and detest any form of handwork, but I love the look of red work. What's a girl to do?  I decided to do this on my trusty sewing machine.  A pattern I have wanted to try for some time now is the Winter Twittering pattern by Purl Louise Krush. I took this to the retreat, but it was not worked on at all.

Finally, I decided to do this in blue instead of red. So without further ado, here are my designs so far. After the pictures, I added a really cool tip how you can trace these patterns. 

But first a disclaimer...

I think I take the worst pictures on the net. A 90 year old who has never held a camera could do better. My dash hound could do better with her paws tied behind her back. The flash went off, I had the exposure open too far (I hit a button by accident), and it was really dark outside. When I should do is take 2 minutes and take the pictures again, but nope, here they are. Wince and enjoy! 

Gack! These are worse that I thought. I think I will redo them, but you get the idea. These were done free motion with thick thread (to mimic hand work) using my sewing machine and they averaged around 7"x8", so they are pretty tiny. Those leaves were tricky and the snowflakes were fudged a bit. O

On to the tip. 

Did you know you can print on water soluble Solvy? And that you can iron in it too? Oh yes you can! So here is what I did:  

1--cut a strip of 8.5 x 11 piece of freezer paper. 

2--have a piece of solvy about the same size as the freezer paper. 

3--Iron the solvy onto the freezer paper. Iron both sides. Do NOT have steam going. Remember this is water soluble solvy so water will disintegrate it. 

4--cut the solvy to the same dimensions as the sheet of freezer paper. 

5--Scan the image from the book you want into your computer. Or take a picture of it and then crop it to whatever size you want. Or do like did and download the book from the internet (PLEASE buy these books and don't pirate them) and you will have the images already there. 

6--Place the freezer paper/solvy sheet into your printer and print.

7--Give the sheet a few minutes to set, then peel the solvy off of the freezer paper. Finish printing all of your images and you are ready to go!

When these were printed, I pinned the solvy sheet onto my fabric and started sewing. I did not use a stabilizer or hoop, but that is not a bad idea.. 

PPS--I am relieved to say that Michelle received the give away book. That was fast delivery. I enjoyed that so much I think I'll do another one before Christmas. Stay tuned!