Triple Finish

Very happy to report that this week, the batik scrap project begun two weeks ago...

...is a finished landscape quilt!

A big shout-out to VVHH for his part in this. He drilled three tiny holes in each seashell so that they could be sewn to the beach and not simply glued. If this were staying here at our house, Aileen's Jewel-It glue (great for gluing lightweight objects onto fabric) would have sufficed. But like most of my landscapes, this quilt is going into my Etsy shop, and will be rolled up on a pool noodle for shipping. So the shells--which were first glued on for easier sewing--could pop off if they weren't also attached with thread.

The coolest thing about this quilt, for me, is that it was made completely from scraps, except for the boats, balloons and shells. And there are plenty more scraps left in the drawer!

Also, remember the wanna-be 'ghost quilt' UFO (unfinished object) that was pulled out of the closet last week?

Now it's a FO.  :)

18-1/2 x 21-1/2

The print panels were cut from two different upholstery fabrics (look closely and you'll see that one background is white, the other ecru). I continued the upper red leaf into the lower panel, with color pencils and fabric markers. Both panels' edges were given a good dose of Fray-Check, as the weave wasn't very tight and would have frayed.

The border and binding are regular quilting cottons. It's easy to mix fabric weights and types in this project.

The hardest part, as usual for me when fabric markers are involved, was not getting too crazy with them! And as mentioned in the last blog entry, they really were necessary, because the stitching in this mid-tone border barely showed.

OFF SUBJECT:  Also this week, a finish for something for the Lucy drawer (Lucy is my little granddaughter).

This was knitted with Deborah Norville Serenity Chunky Heather yarn in a beautiful coral/gray/ecru mix called Oatmeal. Lucy won't be able to wear it until a year from now or maybe even the one after, but she has enough sweaters knitted to get by until then (Grandma just can't stop making them!).

So, all in all, it was a more productive week than usual. But only in the studio. The rest of the house...eh, not so much. Hey, we can only be in one place at a time, right?

Have a great weekend!

UPDATE: September is my birthday month, and we are celebrating at Linda's Landscapes shop on Etsy with FREE shipping! Just enter coupon code BDAY4LINDA at checkout.

Linda

Batik Scrap Stash-Busting

Scraps are scraps, but for some reason batik scraps seem special to me. Maybe it's because they work in landscape quilts so well. So mine have their own drawer, where they're sorted by color family.

After six years, the drawer is full. Time to do some batik scrap busting.

 Strips were cut, some remaining straight-edged (many were from leftover binding) and some quickly given a wavy edge with the rotary cutter.

For a sky, raw-edge strips of purple, pink, red-orange and yellow-orange batik were glued (edges only) to a piece of batting (which had already been fused to a backing fabric), each strip slightly overlapping the one above it.

Then came some mountain shapes, then strips for water. Last, a wider yellow-gold strip was glued down for beach.

Sailboat fabrics were trotted out for auditioning. Paper-backed fusible was applied to the wrong side of the chosen boats before cutting them out.

One edge satin-stitched; lots more to go.

All strip edges were quickly stitched down with Superior clear Mono-Poly on low tension.

Deciding to satin-stitch the raw edges of the sky and mountains, I chose several colors of 40-weight polyester thread (Isacord) for the top and a 100-weight polyester (Invisifil) for the bobbin. 

Using a dense (.35 stitch length), a medium-wide (5.0) zigzag stitch, a size 14 topstitch needle and the open-toe dual-feed foot, I spent two pleasant afternoons covering raw edges at a moderate speed. Not a single thread broke or bird-nested.

This area of the water was accidentally shorted on fabric. Enough batting showed through that I didn't trust the satin-stitching to cover it. What to do?

Easy. (This whole project is easy!) Just cut out another piece of fabric and glue it over the area. Here you see it before the raw edges were stitched down:

Also, see that all-too-obvious vertical join? No problem there, either. It will be covered with the sail of one of the boats.

Oh, and what to do with the leftover trimmings from the strips?

Cut them up into little pieces for a confetti quilt! No waste here when it comes to batiks. Even the selvages get cut up. I think of these little bags of confetti as tubes of paint, and there's quite a palette accumulating in these two lettuce containers.

Next time, this scrap project will be a finished landscape quilt.


Moving on to some news from the 2016 Kentucky State Fair: The Visit received first place in the landscape/pictorial category. My first blue ribbon ever!

Type garrison quilt into the search box (on sidebar) to see posts about the making of The Visit.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Linda