Component quilting lets me streamline my quilting. I have two quilts I’m working on that will need some bugs. Why?
Both of these pieces are going to need some help building a pathway. Bugs are a great way to do that. They flitter across the surface and they create movement. But these need a significant number of bugs. It’s just easier to make a batch. I think ended up making 35 in all.
I did damsel flies, moths, and small white butterflies for the frog/turtle quilt.
For the bluebird quilt, I wanted larger white butterflies.
This batch of bugs was a color lesson for me. Normally I ignore gold and silver thread. When there’s purple and green metallic thread, why would I use gold or silver.
All of the bug bodies are from Madeira FS2/20 thread. The black core thread really looks like beading up close.
I tried the opalescent white as a butterfly wing. I was underwhelmed. I really don’t like the pink quality.
I needed the white that silver brings. I tried going over it with silver afterwards. It was not improved.
Opalescent white under silver does a nice bright white. For those birds, nothing else will do.
I wanted a softer quality for the moths and the swamp. So they were done from polyester threads.
For the damselle flies I needed a solid carapace and see-through wings. The iridescent thread did the wings nicely, even with the pink cast.
Different threads offer really big differences in the result. In this case, it keeps the bugs separate from each other and from the other elements in the quilt.
Size is a limit with component quilting. Things under an inch and a half are hard to keep crisp and have too heavy an outline when they’re applied. But for most elements, it allows me to choose where to put what. Choice is good.
I’m a big believer in documentation and in keeping track. The last quilt I finished was numbered 1,162 since I started counting my quilts forty years ago. I figure there were about 100 before I started counting.
So I was pretty shocked when I found I had 12 unlabeled quilts from this year and it got me to think about labels.
At one point I embroidered labels with a pfaff.
Years ago, I had a gallery person remove labels from quilts of mine, because she wanted to be the only port of contact for people to reach me. That was before we all knew how easy it is to find anyone on the internet. Some of those quilts were stolen later before I replaced the labels. I have forgotten her name and her gallery. I’ve never forgotten what she did. She didn’t mean harm, but there are always unintentional consequences. There is no way I will ever see those quilts again.
I now make labels that are glued and stitched into the back of my quilt. You cannot remove them without permanently obviously damaging the quilt. Once I found this method, I never looked back.
Recently I found a method that makes fabulous labels I can personalize exactly to my needs. Avery labels used to have computer programs for you to use to print labels. I haven’t seen those in years, but they do have a service online where you can design labels either in batches or one by one. Printavery.com has a full-service label printing program. I use the 5264 6 label sheets for large quilts. They are 3.3″ x 4″. You can put both text and pictures on the label. I also use the 5263 10 labels sheets for smaller quilts. Those are 2″ x 4″.
The labels are all well and good, but a paper label is longterm useless. So instead I print my labels on June Tailor Quick Fuse Fabric Sheets for Ink Jet Printers. These sheets are a regular size 8.5″ x 11″ piece of fabric with fusible on the back. You can print them and cut them into whatever label sizes you want. They fuse beautifully with a hot iron.
So what do you need on a label? Your name and the quilt’s name are kind of the basics. Then it’s a matter of intent. The quilt for your beloved child, or someone laid up in a wheel chair is personal. I’d whatever you feel the need to say. Uncle Bob, Christmas 2024, made with love. For your new baby Beth from Granny. Whatever.
Commercial needs are different. What I want out of a quilt label is to identify the quilt, and make it possible for someone to reach me if they need to. I also want a label they can’t pry off with a crow bar.
I’m working with a large body of quilts still in house, so I need an inventory number of some kind. That number is the next number on the list plus the year it was created. So number 1162-24 is the 1,162nd quilt I made, finished in 2024. Hopefully, I won’t screw up and put down the wrong number. It has happened before. But remember, I also have the name of the quilt on the label.
I use my studio name, Thread Magic Studio, because it too is an identifier. If they type that in on line, they’ll be able to reach a current address and phone number for me.
I used to pick on picture for the year for all the quilts. Now I put the picture of that quilt on instead. It’s an instant identifier.
I’ve debated the next part for a while. Currently, I have my shipping address and phone number. But things change. If I’m sending out an older quilt that might have old information, I check and replace the label. If I’m sending out a large quilt to an owner, I ask them if they would prefer a label with their contact information on it.
Should I add a website and an email? It’s not a bad idea, but there’s only so much space. I can’t personally read anything in size 9 type. I think internet information is more likely to change than physical addresses.
So this is what label sheet looks like. I’ll cut it apart with a rotary cutter and round off the edges.
Some Tips
There is sew-in label fabric available which I do not like nearly as much. The fabric isn’t as nice and it doesn’t fuse. The packages all look much the same so check.
This does require an ink jet printer. Don lothes them, but a laser printer will fuse the fabric to your printer. Very unhappy.
You probably want to feed these sheets one at a time through the printer. They do jam sometimes.
You can print anything you would on regular paper. But keep in mind what it looks like. The preview section on the program will you check.
Clean your iron first. Or use a pressing cloth. The iron fabric tends to smear easily.
Is it worth the time? I find it so. I can’t keep track otherwise. But any quilt you make deserves to recognize you as the artist, and the information to find it’s way home.
It’s that time of year, when I look at the pile of quilts at my feet and review what I did last year. I made 46 quilts this year, large and small.
Because of health issues, I haven’t pursued shows right now. My heart doctors say things are staying stable, and I have enough work to promise a show, so I will be doing that in 2025.
How does an upcoming show affect work? It means the niggly questions get put to the side. You produce as much as you can. So you don’t do things you need to ponder about for a while. No big experiments.
Since I wasn’t prepping a show, this was the year for those niggly questions. All kinds of experiments.
Waterfalls
I figured out how to make a waterfalls frp, organza and lace.
Pine Trees
I worked out a new way to make pine trees from cheesecloth.
Desert landscapes
I worked on deserts, sand and cactus.
Cloud Shapes
I studied clouds.
Sunflowers
And sunflowers.
Yellow Birds
I had a desperate need for small yellow birds.
Major Quilts
Here are the large quilts I finished.
Visual Paths
Here are the visual paths I made.
small work
Here are the little quilts
It’s easy to feel like I’d done less this year. I have had years where I produced more. But I’m pleased with the questions I solved, the skills I built and the creatures new in my world. The quilts are really just a by product.
Most of these quilts are available for sale on my web and Etsy site. The Etsy sale is over, but you can always make an offer on a quilt, if it’s a bit out of range. And if you have work of mine, you can always trade up. Those of you who have quilts of mine are family, because you house my children. You always can have the family discount.
I have been known every so often, to make an art joke. Not a play on artists’ names or a verbal exchange. Every so often, I take a fairly well known piece of art and place its content within the artmostphire where I live.
The new roseated spoonbill quilt is named Pinkie, after the Gainsborough Pinkie
Why? Partially because it amuses me. I see most people as animals, not in a negative way, but in the sense that we live as animals do in a flesh-and-blood world. I embroidered my pinkie as a roseated spoonbill in her wild coastal setting.
Does it change the value of my Pinkie, to know that about her? May be. It’s nice to know where things come from.
But like all good art, it changes how we think. My Pinkie is a lovely creature, looking formidable and wild and yet fragile where she is. The girl, Sarah Moulton (1783–1795), is just as formidable. Her ribbons were thrown to the wind, but I get the feeling she could make her commands known and obeyed. Basically, your standard teenager. For all that, her father deserted her and she ended up in school in England where she died of a cough when she was twelve.
My point is that neither beauty or poise keep us safe in this world. It’s an odd mix of good luck and strongminded will that keeps us going,
I know. It’s not funny. But in the tradition of court jesters everywhere, the point is to make us think differently. I’m short enough. I might as well apply for the job.
Usually, Saturday is the day I prep the blog. Sometimes I’m a bit ahead. This week I was not. And last night my leg went out.
So when the ice and rain hit today, Don declared a studio day off. I spent the day working on photos of the new quilts I’ve just finished. And I decided to make meringues.
I’m a good cook, even if I’m a bit heavy in the butter, cream, and beef department. I’m pretty good most of the time. But every year or so, I have a state-of-the-art disaster: the chainsaw chicken massacre, where I tried to bake stewing hens. Or the time I made black and blue cornbread. I was making blue cornbread and the thermostat on the oven broke. Or Treebark in the snow. I had a jelly roll disintegrate while I was trying to roll it. There was no hope for it. I glued it together with raspberry jam, covered it in powdered sugar and called it treebark in the snow. People still ask me for that. I don’t think it can be reproduced/
I wasn’t very mobile, but I thought I could arrange things well enough that it wouldn’t matter. I prepped the meringue, put it in a pipping bag, started to pipe little stars and watched as incredibly sticky meringue oozed out of the top of the bag on to everything on the table. My cutting board. All the spoons and forks. The spice rack. Don’s computer. I had made meringue glue. Very effective.
So here are the quilts I made earlier this week before I glued everything in my kitchen to the piping bag.
It wasn’t a complete fail. Don liked the meringues enough to lick the beaters.
You can see it’s easier if I’m just allowed to quilt.
My leg is better today and the ice is gone, so I’m off to the studio. These quilts will be up on the site shortly.
I have a tendency to lose things. I have four million screwdrivers somewhere. That does not mean that I can find them when I need them. Samuel Delany said that the coathangers turned into paper clips, just when they were needed as coathangers. I believe that, sort of.
I also don’t organize well. I am ashamed that any time I move, I have 100 boxes that are full of the same mix of threads, machine feet, odd tools, and fabric bits. I’m working towards a better sense of that. I can’t find anything because everything is everything.
Most of my machines come with a space for accessories. That’s nice. Except that they have to fit in all the accessories. Which means they’re kind of big and quite clunky. And they don’t fit on my sewing tables. They also make a tremendous crash if they fall off the table due to the vibration when I sew.
So I tend to have kits for different tasks and for the machines I use for those tasks.
I’m obsessed with these tin pencil boxes from Dollar Tree. They come in different patterns so I know which one I need for each machine.
What is in the box? What I need to clean a machine and the feet I use for the tasks I do with that machine. So each box has oil and a good cleaning brush, Each box has fresh 90-topstitching needles, And an appropriate darning foot.
The tools are not the same. The old 930 and the 770 both take different non-standard screwdrivers. The 770 is prone to thread caught in the take-up lever, so I have a tool in the 770 box for slicing through=thread tangles.
I have a box for my 99 and 66 Singers. They are a short shank machine that needs a foot that is completely different from the Berninas. They’re a straight stitch machine so they aren’t set up for cord binding. I use them mostly as piecing machines.
But I use the other machines for corded binding, so there is a regular pressure foot and a Bernina #3 foot for buttonholes along with the darning foot.
Am I more organized? Bless me, I hope.
How can you be more organized?
Analyze the tasks you do in your studio
Gather the tools you use for those tasks
Find a container and space where you can keep those.
I’m not going to live long enough to sort through a bag of all the sewing machine feet I own to find the one I need every time I stitch. If I have a kit set for each machine, I’ve eliminated the time I waste hunting what I need.
Next organization:
I need a place to put in tools for each machine: pins, clips, scissors, bobbins, hemostat, the feet and tools I don’t use all the time but I want available. I have these already, although I’ve moved machines enough that they’ve taken on the quality of “this is where I dumped stuff.”
Then maybe we organize cutting room. If you haven’t seen me in a while I’ll be under the table, trying to find the floor.
Next stop, will I actually try Swedish Death Cleaning? Probably not.
i need to start this post with a full disclosure. I am deeply dyslexic. I wasn’t diagnosed until I was teaching myself, but the b’s, p’s and t;’s periodically spin like tops for me. I’m not so hot on left and right either.
So when I wanted to add a reflected image into water on a quilt, it wasn’t an easy thing.
I start most quilts start with a good dyslexic exercise. I draw in pencil and trace a copy with a Sharpie. The drawing is ironed onto the back as a pattern and is backward. My thread colors top and bottom are the same, so I know where I’m going. This is charted water.
But a reflection isn’t exactly the same. I wanted to put a reflection of the birds in royal rails.The reflection in the water needs to be flipped vertically. But not horizontally. Add to the confusion that if you trace the shapes with Steam a Seam 2, the pieces will be cut flipped horizontally. I thought I could accommodate that by flipping it upside down. Nope. That did not work. I ended up with feet that pointed the wrong direction, Here’s the thing. By the time you take the drawing, trace out the pieces for the shadow in organza and put them on to Steam a Seam 2 to glue them, they’re backward again.
I never figured it out for this quilt. When I put in the water there wasn’t enough space for the reflection. It whipped me.
I can see it if I make a model. If I try to hold it in my head, my head explodes.
I finally made a little model. Both images are flipped horizontally. The bottom frog is flipped vertically.
I made several color layers from the drawing tracing out the frog, the turtle and the snail bits in separate color layers of red, dark green, and light green. I laid the turtle layer over the whole drawing, and placed the cut-out bits in. It was tedious, but it worked.
Now what is left is to place in water over and under the shadow image. And add waterlilies.
I feel like I have a new tool for my tool box! All kinds of reflections coming.
I got seduced by this mockingbird in a threat display. The feathers were amazing. But it was way off what I usually do. I work with water most of the time. I don’t think in desert.
So I did my research. Looked up cactuses. Found pictures of owls living in cactus burrows, which really intrigued me.
I made lizards, owls, and cactus. When I got those up, my mockingbird didn’t fit in. It was a whole different energy. I left out of the desert owls and at some point, it drifted to the floor.
These owls made sense. And out of all those lizards, only one was right.
After I’ve finished a pile of quilts, I find all kinds of bits left over. I start a quilt by making a number of pieces I think will fit into the piece. But they change a lot as I work them out in the embroidery. And sometimes a piece just doesn’t fit into what I had in mind.
This is a familiar moment. I have embroideries I keep for years, waiting for the right piece. An embroidery that size is an investment of at least a week of stitching. But if it’s not right, it’s not right. I’ve been known to completely redraw and redo something that just was wrong. Or use leftover roses and butterflies with the same abandon as I would leftover mushrooms. I think the bird landed under the chair. That’s where I found it 6 months later, along with a set of lizards I hadn’t used on the desert quilt
There was this amazing orange piece of hand dye. It fit right in
And if I had those lizards around, I think I would be annoyed as well.
There are several studio rules I try to keep for good mental hygiene.
Put it up where you can see it.
Wait until you know you’re right.
Hold on to work even if you don’t know its purpose.
Trust yourself that your instincts are correct.
Remember that nothing is wasted. Not time, because it’s learning time. Not materials, because it will turn into something someday.
Remember that energy is renewable. If your energy fails, it’s nap time.
Remember that it will all be alright in the end. If it’s not alright, it’s not the end.
It’s ready to back and bind now. I’m so glad I waited for this piece to be right.
Every winter I take up a new project to get me through the snow. I try to learn something new. I try to accomplish something entertaining.
I’ve been wanting to make a book out of my blog posts. If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I try to bring you into the studio, messes and all. I like the transparency of walking you through my project, and experiments, sharing what I’ve learned.
I will not simply copy off the blog. I intend to weave it into a reference you can use for techniques, information, and inspiration. I’ll be covering design, color theory, techniques, tools, and materials you may never have tried before. Would you like that book?
Here’s my introduction.
Welcome to my studio! Like most artists, this is where my mind lives. This is where the work of my hands exists. This is where my heart beats. This is where my soul breathes. I’ve taught free motion stitchery for 40 years. You may think that means I’m out of date. But I’ve learned an immense amount about thread, about stitchery. about expression, and about healing hearts. Because we heal through expression. We heal by transforming our experiences into the works of our hands. I’ve know that within the context of stitchery, I teach courage and confidence. Art takes both. The good news is that they are muscles that can be built as opposed to a gift you either have or don’t have. Our courage is best when we are children and we don’t care about whether we succeed or not. We simply do things and enjoy the task. We can lose that courage, but we can gain it back by suspending judgment and just doing. Confidence comes from courage. It is the knowledge that we can only learn to do something well by doing it badly for a while. Everything worth doing is worth doing badly. We have confidence that in time we will do it well. With those two skills we can learn everything. The articles in this book are based on years of blog posts. They are not slavishly reproduced. Instead they’ve been groomed into a collection of updated skills, projects, art statements and stories, meant as a guide for your own work. I had a marvelous Bosnian neighbor called Hanifa. Hanifa baked unbelievable pies, baklava, and pastries. They were unassailable. But she was a bit worried that anyone else might use her recipes. She would tell you anything, but she wouldn’t tell you everything. One or two ingredients or processes would be missing. Many times, enough was missing that your cake wouldn’t rise. She was the best! She never wanted to be less than that. She was just a bit proprietorial. I don’t need to be the best. I only need to do my best. But I’m very good at what I do. And I will never give you a recipe for a cake that won’t rise. Because I want you to be your best as well. So welcome! I intend to show you everything.
This is where I need some help. Would any of you be willing to read and comment on this as I work on it? I also will be offering some small learning projects I need someone to help vet.
If you are able, interested, or have thoughts about this, please leave a message in the comments. As always, I want to write a book you want to have.
