Out with the Old

I'm so happy to say that I've finished off the oldest horse in studio! A *big* achievement! The resin is Brigitte Eberl's Lorenz and he's been painted a medium to light dappled gray. This guy is jam packed with hairing detail that doesn't show in the photos. He's off to his owner Monday. Below is just a fraction of his photos but you can get the idea. :) Enjoy.

I leave for Washington D.C. Tuesday for the week. I have a chestnut Mini Pearl resin that was also just completed and I think I'll give her her own blog post too after I'm back in studio so the blog doesn't stay so outdated.

More Pure Happiness

So I forgot to take a picture of the quilt getting sandwiched, but at least I can tell you what I used. See that spray can below? Good stuff. I'll lay out my top piece on a large flat area and then carefully put my batting on top of it. I'll peel back sections and spray this stuff before meshing back together. Repeat for your backing layer.

I don't like pinning. I think it tends to pull fabric around, and well...I'm just uncoordinated with the stupid little things. Plus it's much faster to spray than to try to put five hundred safety pins and all those holes in your fabric. Other nice thing about this stuff is that it lasts a while. I've had this can for years and years and it's not spraying a clumpy mess - still that nice clean (well not really, but you get what I'm trying to say) sticky mist.

So, the other thing that I do vastly different from the normal quilters, is that instead of starting in the middle of your quilt and working outward, I like to start at a corner. The reason for this is that I've found it much more efficient to quilt a little, readjust your fabric so that there are no creases in the sandwich, and quilt a little more, rinse, repeat. Every time I started in the middle, I got a crease in either the top fabric or the backing fabric, no matter how many times I tried to adjust. When you quilt, even in free motion where your machine's feeddogs are down, you're still pulling some of those layers more than others. There is ultimately going to be adjusting...or creases which look awful unless you have a long arm machine or know a secret I don't (which is very possible).

Here's a picture of the machine during free-motion quilting. You can't see them as they're under the quilt sandwich, but the feeddogs are lowered so there is nothing directing the fabric but my hands. I wanted a fun tighter pattern to kind of punch down the neutral fabrics so that the blue bows stood out just a bit more. So I'm doing an echo shell pattern on everything except the blue fabric and borders.

The top has a really pretty variegated thread in brown tones, though I'm keeping things neutral on the back. You can see the quilting pattern more clearly in the photo of the back below. 

*Lots* more quilting left to go!

Misc. Creativity

So I forgot to take a photo of it before I left it over at Mom's house, but the inside of the quilt top is fully pieced together and I'm waiting on fabric to come in for the borders and flower petals that will be put on. I do have my image of the pieces on the design board though so I'll put that up. Borders and flowers will be the same width as the squares and in the cream with dark polka dots fabric.

I also thought it would be fun to post photos of the Christmas cards I did for the families this Holiday. All are done in water colors with some bordering in micron ink pens.

This first one is for Dad. The block of the building on the left there is his current hangar. Dad used to be an architecht and contractor and is planning on doing some remodeling to the building to include office space as well as extend some of the shop space. He gets a big kick out of illustrative renderings so I thought I'd do a quick sketch up for his card.

Mom's is this next one. Mom is slightly obsessed with miniature donkeys. This one is way cuter in person.

Brother Chris has a little Toy Daschund named Sydney who is just a complete Diva. So, she is sprawled on her favorite white leopard fleece blanket with her bling color and her sparkly presents.

Chris is roommate joined us for Christmas as his family is in Missouri. He just bought a boxer puppy this year named Dyson. Chris insisted I should have put the hat in his mouth.

The next round of family cards is for hubby Matt's side. His sister (who's name happens to also be Jennifer Lee, only she spells her middle name Leigh) has a fun black lab who always is eating things. Hence ornament in mouth.

 For Mother-in-Law Karen, a cute little snowglobe. Matt used to have a tradition of buying her snowglobes for Christmas before she finally demanded he stop due to her lack of space for any more. So, next best thing was the paper version. Very spacially friendly.

And last but not leat is Jenn's daughter Trinity. That little girl is all about her pink and princesses.