Recently my nephew’s girlfriend, Kat, graduated from massage therapy school. She did this while holding a full time job and caring for her two young daughters, an amazing achievement in my book. I made this quilt, Follow Your Dreams, as a present for her graduation.
Hawaiian Sparkle
This is a Hawaiian Appliqué square that I made for a class I am teaching at the Fort Collins, CO Presser Foot on September 20. This is a contemporary approach to design and needle-turn appliqué a Hawaiian quilt, and doesn’t involve the traditional folded cutwork that can be so difficult to perfect. In fact, this method if pretty foolproof, and very easy to learn. I can prove it – as a complete novice appliqué quilter I designed and made a quilt using this method and it won several national awards. (See Endless Hawaiian on my Contemporary Traditional gallery page.)
The appliqué top is made from a Lunn hand dye and the background is one of my own hand paints.
Its been a lot of fun to get back to Hawaiian quilting for a bit, its such a chance to work with beautiful fabrics without cutting them up into small pieces.
Hawaiian Sparkle Close Up
Rather than tossing some of the fabrics in my stash that are no longer the kind of fabric I use in my quilts, I’ve been painting them. Not only is it a lot of fun, but I now have about 30 transformed fat quarters in luscious colors and various techniques using mostly Setacolor paints. On a few I have added some Jacguard paint. Here are three of the pieces that I’ve painted recently.
This piece was painted on quality muslin yardage which I had kept for years, for some unknown reason.
Now I wish I had a lot more of this fabric, a white on white Christmas fabric that I picked up on sale after the holidays a few years ago. It painted up beautifully.
I had almost 8 yards of a boring solid pink good quality cotton. I think that I had planned to use it for a back for a quilt for my little girl when she graduated to a big girl bed. She is now 27, and I never use solids anymore, so I decided it was safe to transform it. The pink added such a wonderful undertone to every piece I painted on it.
So my suggestion is – go for it! See what you can do with those out of date fabrics before you toss them.
My guild has asked me to do a landscape design workshop, and I made this small quilt as a sample, using the relatively simple technique which I intend to teach. The inspiration was a picture that my son had taken in Switzerland, while he was doing an internship there. Here is the original photo (by my son, Alex Robinson):
