Thursday, November 06, 2025

Sunset over water

Hi and welcome 😊 Are you recuperating from the time changing and the days getting shorter? It's been typical fall rainy and blustery days. The trees lost most of their leaves in the last couple of days. Welcome Fall! 🍁

Sunset over water

After making my Pink Turtlehead flower piece, I decided that I wanted to make something smaller and simpler using the same technique. This one is based on a photo of the sky and water that I took going to Antarctica. I love the colours of the sunset and thought it would translate well into stitched coils.

Sunset over water

Working in a 5" embroidery hoop really made it easier. Here's my process - from the photo, I made a coloured sketch.

Photo taken on our way to Antarctica

Sketch of what I wanted it to look like in the hoop

As you can see from the sketch and the finished piece, I didn't quite get the proportions right. I wanted to use the rule of ⅓ (as in the first ⅓ is water, while the rest is sunset and sky. I was happily attaching coils to the frame when I realised that I was just going to get water! I ended up un-stitching a number of the coils, and I'm happy to say that it wasn't as difficult to fix as I expected.

Water creeping up!

Water subsided and horizon added

Once the horizon was attached, it was a matter of condensing my sketch to fit the rest of the frame. Below you see what the piece finished to, before I secured the background to the embroidery hoop.

Coiling finished - now to finish the piece in the hoop

Finished Sunset over water

One Monthly Goal

I'm not sure if I'll be able to get this done, but maybe stating it as a goal will help 😊. I really want to make the fourth side of my Cowboy Quilt!

I need to add the last border

What I learned

I'm very happy to report that un-stitching was much easier than expected. I should have un-stitched a bit more but it still looks good.
I really enjoyed working on the sunset part - those colours are amazing! They really make my heart sing 😀
Working in a hoop for the whole project made it so much easier to handle. I'm going to try to keep doing that. I had forgotten that I have square quilting frames that would have made working on the first project (Pink Turtlehead flower) easier.
I've found images for two more coiling projects. One will be 6" while the other will be 4". I'm looking forward to seeing how working in a smaller hoop will affect the process. It's easy to make thinner coils, so I'll be trying that out.

Free Motion Mavericks

Welcome to week 556 of Free Motion Mavericks! It was a very productive week! Thanks for linking up. Here are the projects from last week that included FMQ, ruler work or walking foot quilting.

Kat of Scrapbox Quilts is still busy making lap and baby quilts to donate. They are so cute!

Flannel quilt with outline quilting by Kat

Straight line quilting by Kat

Donnalee is making runners for her guild's quilt show boutique in January. Here is a pile of quilted runners waiting to be bound.

Quilted runners by Donnalee - ready to sew down the binding!

Preeti of Sew Preeti Quilts made an amazing backpack using Patterns ByAnnie.

Preeti is modeling her amazing backpack

An inside view of Preeti's backpack

Melva of Melva Loves Scraps finished her Paper Lantern quilt. She sewed down the binding with a long running stitch. How lovely!

Melva's Paper Lantern quilt

Melva's finish for the quilt binding

Brenda of Songbird Designs is FMQ her big quilt! She's promised us previews - and here they are! You'll want to go to her post to see the photos up close!

Brenda's FMQ of swirls on her big quilt

Kathleen McMusing participated in Michelle's QAL and made this lovely ghostly runner. How cute is that! Since Kathleen created her own pantograph for this one.

Kathleen's Ghost Runner

It's now your turn!😎

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

Weaving on Paper

Hi and welcome. I hope that you've been having fun working on your stitching and quilting projects! I've been going a little crazy making mini weavings on paper and cardstock. What fun - and I did learn a lot about how I like to play - it was an interesting self-discovery.

Mini Woven Projects

Although I was a hand-weaver in my 20's and early 30's, I lost the joy that it brought me as life got ridiculously busy. My 15" loom was too noisy to work on while the babies were asleep and by then I had left behind my guild in Timmins and it wasn't fun anymore. I said that I would get back to it when I retired, but I just don't have the patience to deal with another large complicated hobby...yet. 😔

So you can imagine how intrigued I was when TextileArtist.org's Stitch Club had a workshop with Rachna Garodia. She does a lot of large weaving instillations but when her children were young she started weaving on paper. It was portable and perfect for experimentation. So here are my mini woven pieces so far.

Earth Tones - weaving on a sketch paper background

Earth Tones - mounted in a card

Earth Tones was my first playing session. I used sketch paper, jute, wool and strips of denim and batik. They were the closest materials at hand. It turns out that jute is more difficult to weave than yarn because yarn fibres attach to each other more than jute. This makes yarn easier to compact.

After successfully making my first mini woven piece, I ventured to different paper and yarns. I used a piece of left-over card stock with perle cotton for the warp, as well as the bottom and top of the piece. I wove in some batik strips (earth and sky) at each end, and then added left-over pieces of woven fabric from my woven jacket. Since the pieces were not as large as the width of the piece, I wove the sections next to them with beautifully hand-dyed variegated yarn. I really love how that came out. I used a gorgeous strip of orange batik in the middle to separate each section.

Autumn Beauty
card stock 5" square, weaving 3½" square

I then got very experimental and used a pink ribbon for the warp of Pink at Night. I had forgotten that when you use chunky yarn, you can cover most of the warp, even if you do a plain weave. However, when the fabric used in the weft is not fuzzy or chunky, you really get the effect of the plain weave and see both the warp and weft. I played around a lot with this one because I wasn't getting the look that I wanted. In the end I decided to balance out the fuzzy and chunky yarns with other materials.

Pink at Night - experimenting with ribbon in the warp

I haven't mentioned this yet, but because the space available to weave is very limited in these tiny pieces, it's best to weave the bottom and top first. Then you work your way to the middle. In this next piece, Blue Seas, I just wanted to play with blue. The warp and the top is no 5 perle cotton. I used some gorgeous hand-dyed yarn at the very bottom (blue) and the top (turquoise). I added lighter perle cotton, a few rows of batik fabric, novelty yarn and one row of navy blue fabric with yellow specks.

Blue Seas min woven piece

This next woven piece was done with four types of yarn. I started off with a hand-dyed white yarn with pink and yellow specks, a green novelty yarn with tuffs of colour, a light and dark wool with a beige strand and finally an orangish wool woven in plain and soumak weave. As I was playing, I was thinking that all of the layers look like part of a desert. The top looks like salted caramel, then there's chocolate and pistachio ice cream with sprinkles and a layer of white cake. I called this one Salted Caramel Sunday.😋

Salted Caramel Sunday

This tiny piece is the last one I've made. It's on water colour paper what was painted for another project. Since there's a design on it, I wanted to make a tiny woven piece that would work with the painted section. It's got some finer perle cotton and yarns, as well as a piece of tule and ribbon. I added a few rows of soumak and plain weave.

Mini Sorbet
4" x 3" watercolour background with a 1½" x 2½" weaving

Table Scraps Challenge

October's Table Scraps Challenge was neutral with denim. That was the first hand woven piece I made. When I looked at the Challenge's "rules", it did mention quilting, so Autumn Beauty fits the bill - with pieces of quilted fabric inserted within the weaving. 😎

Earth Tones with neutral
colours and denim

Autumn Beauty with quilted
fabric woven into the piece

What I learned

Sketch paper is a little bit flimsy to weave on (but still doable) while card stock, watercolour and mixed media papers are perfect.
I love adding strips of fabric in the pieces, especially when they aren't wide enough and weaving is required to finish the section.
Experimenting when I had no expectations was much easier than when I had an idea in mind. I found it more frustrating to get a specific look but then it was wonderful when I solved my challenge. I guess that playing is a bit of give and take. If you want to end up learning something useful you probably need to be challenged!😊
I can't tell you what most of my yarn is made of because I tend to buy based on colour and not the material. This is fine since I use most of it for fibre art and now weaving!
After purchasing (and finding) photo frame cards, I was able to measure the size of the weaving so that they would fit the card opening. Two of my mini woven pieces don't fit the cards, so I'm going to purchase magnets to stick behind them. They would look wonderful on the fridge!
I love making these mini woven pieces because it's so easy and fast. With bits of yarn, paper and anything else you want to add (fabric, found objects, etc.) you can make something beautiful in under 2 hours.

FM Mavericks

Welcome to week 555 of Free Motion Mavericks! It was a very productive week! Thanks for linking up. Here are the projects from last week that included FMQ, ruler work or walking foot quilting.

Sally of Crafts, Cavies and Cooking has finished FMQ and binding her wonderful quilt. I'm sure that we'll see some glamour shots soon, but here it is, all bound!

Sally's wonderful FMQ and bound quilt!

Kat of Scrapbox Quilts made and FMQ this lovely Elmo child's quilt. Check out her various FMQ - you can see it best on the back! It was a great project to practice on.

The front of Kat's Elmo quilt

The back of Kat's Elmo quilt

Donnalee is making more runners for her guild's upcoming quilt show in January. The top runner is made of Charley Harper fabric that she picked up at her guild's free table - what luck! See Donnalee's other runners on her post.

Donnalee makes a runner using Charley Harper fabric

Donnalee's finished Thanksgiving table runner

Deb of the Scrappy Quilter finished this lovely Little Owls children's quilt. Her quilting ran along the horizontal lines and outlined each owl. There is even a surprise owl block in the back!

The front of Deb's Little Owls quilt.

The back of Deb's Little Owls quilt.

Gail from Quilting Gail used up some recent scraps to make two lovely zip pouches and a placemat.

Gail's lovely zip pouches and placemat

Brenda of Song Bird Designs participated in the Out of the Dark Blog Hop. What a great runner!

See more details of Brenda's FMQ on her post

It's now your turn!

Wednesday, October 22, 2025

Pink Turtlehead Flowers Finished

Allô and welcome😍 I'm so happy to share with you my finished coiled art piece. It was so much fun to make and I'm trying not to make another, simpler one because I have so many other things to do. But you know that "Resistance is futile", right? 😉

Pink Turtlehead Flowers coiled piece finished

I finished the piece shortly after publishing my previous post. Although the coiling and stitching part was finished, I still needed to attach it to the canvas. That's a job that I don't love because it demands more precision than I can usually manage. It came out OK. I stretched it as best as I could and then stappled it down to the canvas. I did learn a lesson which I'll share below.

Pink Turtlehead Flower

Now I need to add the hanging wire to the back - another of my least favourite parts. If I wasn't showing it, I would just leave it as is since I hang these light canvases on a thumb tack or small nail.

The piece will be for sale at the Fall Fibre Fling coming up this weekend. I'm not sure that I want it to sell, so I won't be sad if it doesn't...but if it does, I'll just have to make more 😁

Pink Turtlehead Flower reaching for the sky

Pink Turtlehead Flower among my favourite yard decorations

Pink Turtlehead Flower - photographed outside

Fall Fibre Fling 2025

Piece at Fall Fibre Fling

What I learned

When I was putting the piece onto the canvas, I wish that I had cut the excess fabric a little. That would be best done while the piece is attached to the canvas with thumbtacks. It would probably have been a little more even.
I used the pinking sheers to trim the fabric. As I mentioned, from the back, it's not great but OK. At least it looks good from the front!
It would be nice to make a smaller landscape piece - this is what Julia, our teacher, was demonstrating. I have 5" and 6" embroidery hoops that would be perfect. I eventually plan to make the piece withing the hoop and then leave it there. It's really easy to paint the hoops if necessary - even I can handle that! 😀
This technique is perfect for travelling - all you need is enough strips, lots of thread, a background fabric (possibly in a hoop), scissors and needles. That's about as easy and compact as it gets!
I've also discovered another technique from TextileArtist.org's Stitch Club that I'm making obsessively - weaving on paper. Another easy, small technique with infinite possibilities. If you have Instagram, you can check out my first pieces here.

Free Motion Mavericks

Welcome to week 554 of Free Motion Mavericks! It was a very productive week! Thanks to everyone who linked up. Here are the projects from last week that included FMQ, ruler work or walking foot quilting

Gwyned Trefethen is getting ready for her Open Studio tour. I'm sure that it's going to be wonderful! She has finished FMQ and squaring up her 2024 Rainbow Scrap Challenge quilt. What an amazing finish! We're looking forward to seeing closeups once it's bound.

Gwyned's FMQ and squared off
2024 Rainbow Scrap Challenge quilt

Kat of Scrapbox Quilts has finished a lovely panel wall hanging Kat FMQ lightly around and in all of the elements and borders without adding a filler in the cream background. We're also looking forward to seeing the complimentary runner!

Kat's Tossed Leaves wall hanging

Vicki of Vicki's Crafts and Quilting has been very productive with her lovely Christmas Cardinals wall hanging. She has also made more holiday runners. You'll want to check out her post.

Vicki's Christmas Cardinals panel wall hanging

Details of the quilting on Vicki's Christmas Cardinals

FMQ Turkey runner done by Vicki

Denise from Quiltery made two gorgeous bags ByAnnie. The large one was both quilted and then machine embroidered. Check out her post for more pictures and info!

Denise's lovely quilted and embroidered bags ByAnnie

Sandra Walker of mmm quilts shared with us her Tropical Twist quilt. It's a gorgeous finish and you'll want to check out her post for more yummy photos and closeups!