Christine is a long arm machine quilter, quilt pattern designer, punchneedle pattern designer & author. She publishes her designers under her company Fairfield Road Designs and is also a Thrive Life Independent Consultant. Her blog will feature news about her different companies, insights into her family life and previews of new patterns and designs and yummy Thrive recipes.
After Nellie and I took our Surface Design course with Elaine Quehl I played around a bit with one of my new tools - super fun Inktense Pencils.
One of the projects I experimented with was this Hibiscus. The first thing I did was to find a few pictures online such as this one:
Using this picture as a guide, I outlined the general shape of the flower and then started shading in with my Inktense Pencils
. After all of my colours were set down, I covered my cutting board with a large plastic bag and then started spraying the fabric with water. The colours then intensified and started to bleed into the surrounding areas - you can see that the pink travelled quite a bit into the green background.
Although I loved using the Inktense pencils and the finished result, I wasn't sure how to finish it off until now!
The first step was to add some borders, so I picked a pink batik for the inner border and a green leaf print for the outer border.
After loading it onto my Gammill, I needed to pick some threads to do some thread painting. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE my variegated King Tut Threads
from Superior Threads.
Green threads for the leaves and background.
Orange and fushia threads for thread painting the flower.
I started with the flower, by outlining the petals with a darker thread and then using some of the lighter threads to add dimension.
Close-up of the flower centre.
The background and borders were next. Here is the finished product! Project number 19 is done and hanging on the wall! I can't wait to use my Inktense Pencils again!!! Machine quilting over top of the Inktense design just makes it come alive!!
I'm so looking forward to 2016 and I just couldn't wait to start on my 52 week UFO Challenge!!
My first project really should be the cover for my 2016 Passion Planner, but I've had an idea about one of the projects that has been on my design wall for over a year so I wanted to act on it!!
In November 2014, my friend Nellie and I took a surface design course from Elaine Quehl. We had an AWESOME time and I was so inspired when it was finished that I used my new skills (and new supplies) to do a few more samples. For the coneflowers, I made a quilt sandwich and then did some thread "sketching" (free motion quilting) with black thread. I then used my new Inktense pencils to shade in the flowers and leaves.
My thread sketch with Inktense shading.
A close-up of one of the coneflowers.
Here is a Youtube video about Inktense pencils:
After I was done shading, I spritzed the fabric with water and the colours just came alive!! I just LOVE this technique BUT I was stumped as to how to finish it.
While I was cleaning my studio last week I came upon a "quilt-as-you-go" tablerunner that I had made years ago and I realized that I could add borders to my quilted piece using that same technique.
My first step was to mark out straight lines where I wanted to have my borders. I needed to make sure that there was at least 1/4" between my quilting and the seam placement line.
Marking the borders with a Frixion pen.
The next step was to lay my first border piece along this line and pin.
Pinning down the first border along the drawn line.
I sewed this border down then did the same with the opposite border. Both of these were then pressed, but I had to make sure that I didn't put my iron near the other lines I had drawn with the Frixion pen, or I would lose them!!
Next step was to pin on the remaining two borders and sew.
Adding the last border.
Adding a hanging sleeve on the back and binding on the edges finished my wall hanging off nicely!!
Adding the binding.
Project #1 is done!!
Finished coneflower wallhanging
.
I really loved this technique and I want to do something like it again, but next time I will make sure that the fabric sandwich I quilt on is large enough to do bigger borders around the edge AND I will make sure that my design is square on the fabric so I don't lose so much area when I trim it. Other than that, I love my first finished UFO!!
.
