I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel

Yeah? That unit in the upper right is just a placeholder. It goes elsewhere, I just needed something for scale

The colors are WAY off idek why.  I don’t know about the circles, because I’d want to add them to the purple curly pieces too. Hmm!

Applique Bootcamp.

This is a conversation I had with my mom this morning. Yesterday I asked her to pick me up a stapler, a pack of 30 glue sticks from office depot and to keep her eye out for a travel iron.

Today she came over with a bag of goodies and presented them to me. Then she noticed this on my table:

Note the box of glue sticks, which is what I had on hand before I asked her to pick me up a new box of 30.

Mom: You have like 10 glue sticks!

Me: I totally go through like 10 a day though.

Mom: Why! Also you have a stapler already, why did you make me buy another one?

Me: I use a lot of glue and my stapler was short. I need a longer one for my long curly pieces.

Mom: Sounds like a personal problem to me.

Anyway…look at my adorable iron! I have seven irons right now. My 80$ rowenta got knocked on the floor too many times and it leaks. I have 5 others which all work, but don’t steam as well as my rowenta. I needed the little iron, because my arms are killing me.  My new little one is pretty hand, but dangerous because it gets really hot and doesn’t turn itself off.

So here’s quilt progress. You can see my long curly pieces in this pic. They’re a bitch to turn. They’re long and skinny with inside curves and points, but they totally make the quilt. I have 5 more to make in purple and then 8 in turqoise between the green and purple border.

(yeah one of them is backwards)

Since this is my sort of hindi inspired quilt I had to include an applique lotus

You can’t see it so great, but it’s awesome sauce.

Side view.

I’m thinking I might use the purple long curly pieces as spines for feathers when I quilt. It’s gon be hot ya’ll

Because someone told me I couldn’t.

My main motivation for doing pretty much anything is almost always someone telling me I couldn’t do it. Seriously, I want nothing for myself, but as soon as someone pisses me off you can guarantee that whatever they said couldn’t be done I’m going to do.

I owe the inspiration for this quilt to two people, both of whom implied I couldn’t, so I did. It’s going to be absolutely spectacular. I have so much applique designed for this, and I can’t wait to get it done. I’ll actually be piecing the quilt together this week and then I can start adding all the applique elements.

Since I’m designing in Illustrator now I though I’d show how the patterns come out. It’s so much neater than drawing the motifs by hand.

This is my printed layout pattern and you can see all the turned pieces behind it. These were originall going to be feathers, but I figured if I was going to do so much applique I might as well go for it so those rounded edges became points.

thats my fabric turned around the floriani stablilizer and glues together upside down to make a handy individual unit.

Tadah! If it looks like a really big piece, that’s because it is. All the applique on this quilt is pretty substancial. The best thing about making the applique in units is that I can audition them. I designed this piece for a specifc place, but I put it in a few different areas and eventually decided on repeating it on a smaller scale elsewhere

That’s it so far. It’s going to look so much better once I add in all the long sweeping pieces like in the top right corner. Mmhmm.

I’ve been MIA, I admit it.

But I’ve been busy! Really, really, busy.

I was in the middle of marking a quilt and had another idea pop into my head so that took over. It’s fine though, I lost interest in the other quilt half way through marking, which is why this quilt will have minimal marking. I’m determinded to have most of it be applique and just a few well placed quilting motifs because I’m so bored of marking my quilts.

Anyway, here it is.

I know, you’re looking at that and thinking “What the hell happened with him! He can barely piece a straight seam!”

That’s totally true, but this whole quilt is piecelique, which i can do. I made about 40 samples to make sure i could handle the curves and I’ve got them down! The miters and inset pieces are a little tricky, but where things don’t line up they’ll be applique anyway. It’s very venetian carnival, hindu art, sari and mendhi inspired. It doesn’t look it now, but it will. I’ve been designing like crazy in Illustrator today to make all my applique with lots of celtic inspired curls and swirls.

It seems like a lot of different influences in one quilt, but that’s how creativity works. I was looking at venetian carnival costumes and got an idea for applique, my background fillers are mendhi inspired and the celtic bits are to add interest and breaks between the borders. I’m really excited about it, I think it’s going to be great once it’s done.

It’s all my own hand dyed fabric, which I used a new base fabric for. It’s a sand washed cotton broadcloth, so it looks AND feels like suede. It’s the most fantastic fabric I’ve ever used and it came in a 60 wide roll so it was very economical for these pieces.

So that’s it, that’s what I’ve been up to. I hope to actually get it sewn together this week and then I can get started on the applique

Here’s the back