Bees on Flowers - Painted art quilts - Bee on Camasia

This is a continuation of a previous post about the making of 2 bees on flowers art quilts.

I decided to paint the one with the purple Camasia flowers first.  They are a native plant to my region and when they bloom, they are such an amazing shade of purple with stark yellow stamens on long stems.  The bees just love them.   And so do I, especially when you are sitting in a field of them.  Below is a picture of my sister and mother near Yelm, WA.

After I had the sketch enlarged, I placed the image on the light box and traced it onto the PFD fabric.  When transferring the image to the fabric, I usually use an engineering pencil and use a light hand so that the lines virtually disappear after the painting is done. 

The PFD fabric was then taped to a foam core board.  I got out all of the painting supplies in the colors that I picked for this picture.  I find that trying to closely match what's in the picture yields the most realistic results.

I mixed up all of the colors and added a bit of extender and white into their own paint cells.  Coffee stir sticks come in really handing when mixing paint.  I have to admit that some of my paints were old, and even though the tops were tightly screwed on, the paint basically hardened a bit.  I have to remind myself to get newer paint next time.  So, here is the painting part all done.  I let it dry overnight and then ironed it.

Stay tuned to see how much this piece changes when the thread sketching part is done.

Five Ladies

I decided to really stretch myself and make an art quilt with 5 ladies on it.  This was a jumping off point after the series of the 10 Garden Ladies.  Every time that I've made faces and hands, there is something that just didn't look right.  So tackling 5 in one piece is going to be a knuckle biting experience.  Wish me luck.

I found an inspiration photo of 5 ladies making slightly goofy poses in an ad for Gundrun Sjogen clothing.  I traced the picture and had it enlarged 700% at my local print shop.  I'ts 38" H x 53" W. Here is the starting pattern for this piece.

As you can see, the faces all look ghoulish, and I know from previous pieces that at this stage that's OK.   I needed the relative size and placement of eyes and mouth to make the faces look realistic later.  I went searching on the internet and found 5 copyright free images of different women that would work for this piece.  I downloaded them, sized them to fit and tacked them up in place on the starting pattern.  A little more work needed to be done to get the sizes just right; one face is too small, another is too large, etc.  And, of course, they will all look very different when done in fabric.  

I hope you like following the steps so far!

Bees on Flowers - painted quilts

I made a few small art pieces with bees on flowers several years ago.  A recent sale of a couple of them led me to wanting to paint a few more.  I have hundreds of pictures of bees on flowers, and it was hard to narrow it down to the ones that I thought would look good as art pieces.  Here are 2 that I landed on:

The technique that I use for this kind of art quilt is to trace the details of the picture using a light box.  I don't draw the background, though.  That part comes with the painting of the blurry details.  Here are the tracings of the photos:

Next, I took the tracings to my favorite print shop in Portland and had the tracings enlarged so that they would be 12" on the long side.  That seems to be a size that is attractive to buyers.

I hope to show you some progress on the actual pieces in the next post.  

Mod Squad Challenge 2025 - Part 3 and Final - J.A.R.

This is a continuation of 2 previous posts about the making of the Mod Squad Challenge for 2025.

I decided to quilt the piece with 4 different colors of thread - purple to match the background, yellow, peach, and sea green.  The stitches are 1/4" apart and were randomly placed to both show and highlight the threads.  Like most quilts, it looks more interesting in person than in the picture.  

I named it J.A.R. (for Joanne Adams Roth and for the colors of Jonquil, Avid Apricot, and Retro Mint).  It measures 24" W x 36" H.

I hope you like it!

Preparing fabric for applique

I prepared some fabric for my machine applique class by following a technique using Mod Podge.  This was shown on The Quilt Show by Kestrel Michaud in episode #3303.

You  mix 1 part Mod Podge with 3 parts hot water.  So, 1/4 c. mod podge with 3/4 c. hot water makes 1 cup of dilute "glue" to bind the fabric threads to each other.  What it does is to keep the tiny thread edges from fraying as you stitch them down.  For a lot of machine applique, it doesn't really matter.  But when you're make an art piece using raw edge techniques, especially the face, it looks so much better when the threads don't ravel.  

I laid the pieces out on a Teflon sheet, then mixed the Mod Podge and painted it on the pieces.  

I let it dry overnight, peeled them off the Teflon sheet, and then cleaned up the Teflon sheet with a scratch pad.  The pieces are pretty stiff, but the color doesn't change once it's dry.  (Below is a picture of the pieces when they were still wet.)

I hope you get a chance to use this technique!  And I hope my students appreciate the extra step I've taken to ensure their success. 

Bernina Stitch Regulator

I bought a Bernina 440 many years ago when they first came out with the Bernina Stitch Regulator (BSR).  At that time I was doing a lot of quilting on my domestic sewing machine and I thought that this new foot would take my quilting to the next level.  Well, it was too slow and clunky for me, so I didn't use it.  Several years ago, I got a Bernina 570 machine and it also came along with a BSR.  I never used it either.

So, this year, I decided that I would give it a try on my newer machine and if it just wasn't going to work for me, that I would sell both of the stitch regulators and get them out of my sewing room.

I watched several videos on YouTube about how to use the BSR and got myself jacked up and ready to go.  But, as luck would have it, my sewing machine broke.  The spring that operates the presser foot went SPROING!  

So, while the newer machine was in the shop, I pulled out my 440 and tried to used the BSR.  There's supposed to be two modes, one with the needle that only moves when you move the fabric, and one where the needle keeps going up and down.  I could only figure out how to find one of the modes on the 440.  In mode one, it was just as slow and clunky as I remembered it to be.    So, no way its going to be used on the 440.

I got the 570 back from the shop and tried the BSR in both modes. Nope.  Still isn't working the way that I would have hoped.  I posted them for sale on our Clark County Facebook page and if I don't get a sale there, I'll put them on Facebook Marketplace.  Wish me luck!

Mod Squad Challenge - 2025 - part two

This is a continuation of a previous post about the making of the 2025 Mod Squad Challenge.

I pulled a few pictures off the internet and landed on one for this challenge.  I used that as my idea and drafted up a couple of designs to fit the 2' wide requirement.

I liked the one with 3 rows the best, so that is what I used to make the foundation pattern for the triangles.  Well, first, I did a little math to make sure that 2 yards would be enough for this pattern.  And yes, I had plenty.  Did I tell you that I like to do math and drafting?  This exercise was right up my ally.

I made up a sheet of the triangle foundations and copied them onto Carol Doaks Foundation Paper.  I also made some cutting templates out of freezer paper, by adding 3/8" to all of the outside edges.    Since I had triangles going in opposite directions, I made the templates for each foundation and marked them as "A" or "B".  I also added directional arrows to be sure to cut them on the grain of the fabric.

Its hard to see in this picture, but following a method that I learned from way back, I placed a post card along the seam line and used the Add-A-Quarter ruler to trim the seam to 1/4".  This was them matched up with the next piece of fabric and sewn.

You can see the sewn seam in this picture.  

The whole piece was then pressed and trimmed.

I placed the completed foundation pieces on the design board, making sure that the color placement was just right.

The final step in piecing the top was to sew the strips together and add the outer borders.  Here is the finished top.  It measures 24" W x 38" H.

I hope you like it so far, and I will show it to you again after it gets quilted.