Seven Sisters Quilt Show

This last weekend was the Seven Sisters Quilt Show. There are seven large mountains in the San Luis Obispo for which the show is named. 

There are six guilds that participate in the annual show.

Below are the quilts I had in this year's show:

All That Glitters:  This is a reverse applique quilt that I've shown on the blog before. It was done as part of a group challenge.

Mars Moonscapes: This one has some of my itajime and arashi shibori fabrics with hand quilting and embroidery.

Tsunami Sunrise - This is with lots of tedious, but to me enjoyable, fabric manipulation.

This week's stitch for my TAST Facebook group was the wheatear.  It was a fun one.

Floral Inspiration

I made great strides in my quilt for  our Cutting Edge's exhibit for PIQF this upcoming October. Here's a little section of it. Since I'm using a reverse appliqué method, there has been so much preparation  before anything  showed up on the top surface. There are five layers in some places and four in others.  It's layered and ready for quilting. Not sure if I'll do hand or machine quilting or a some of both.

With all the rain we have been fortunate to receive in the last months, 

my flowers have some gorgeous blooms.

The iris below is our 4 feet tall, the tallest one I've ever had in our 20 years living here.

Reverse Appliqué Quilt in Process

Teaching has been keeping me way too busy lately, as it does. Haven't had much time to do my own work, but made a little progress on my reverse appliqué piece. I basted together all four layers of fabric. Then I drew my design on tracing paper which I pinned to the quilt. Next, I carefully stitched through all the layers on the machine. Later in the week, I removed the tissue paper and next I will be cutting through the top layer to reveal other fabrics.

Did a little practice on this piece prior to the above to make sure I'd be able to tear off all the tissue paper.

Reverse Applique

It's been nice having today and last Monday off to work a little bit on my quilt for our Cutting Edge Group's PIQF show. I'm using a reverse appliqué process. I haven't done much reverse appliqué, but like how it looks and think it will be the perfect way to do my idea.

Here are a few examples of my prior work with reverse appliqué.

This is part of a quilt I made for for my Master's Show back in 2010.  I really liked this part of the quilt, but the rest, not that much. I had four pieces of fabric layered together and machine stitched a design on the top layer. Then I just cut through the outlined areas to reveal some of each fabric here and there.

This is a vest I made way back when, can't even remember when,  that also has reverse appliqué.

Talk about having a target on your back!

The front was woven, fused strips.  I still enjoy wearing it now and then.

New Quilt Beginnings

I've been working on a new quilt idea in my head and sketchbooks for months.  Over the past few weeks, as time allows, I've made a bit of a start on it.

I'm doing reverse appliqué techniques. I like how the soy wax batik shows through the dark top. More fabrics need to be added to the back and more cutting through from the front needed as well.