Losing my marbles

This is my latest piece titled, “Losing my marbles”. I made it for a guild challenge. We were given a random candy and were to make something using that candy as inspiration. I was lucky and got this package of M&M’s . When I poured them out, they rolled around like marbles. That gave me the inspiration. I used the color of the wrapper for my hand dyed background fabric. I then marbled some fabric for the marbles. I made those in gradating sizes to hopefully give the illusion of the marbles pouring out. The marbling was done with fabric ink and shaving cream.  You can see what I did on the Dharma Trading website. This link shows the product I used and the technique.

I hand appliqued the circles using an extra layer of batting to give them more definition. It was a fun project to work on and I have it hanging in my studio.

Adding texture

Part of what I love about quilting, is the texture added to the quilt and how the quilt changes because of it. I recently finished this flower applique quilt for a client, with lots of white negative space. This gave me great space to add texture. The applique is beautiful and well done, and my job was to enhance it. I quilted a fairly dense background fill around the applique This made the applique stand out. The next task was to fill those giant blank corners. I love to quilt feathers, and this gave me the perfect place to play I marked 2″ from the edges and filled that space with freehand feathers. To make those pop, I quilted densely with freehand lines. I wanted this to feel more organic so the lines were quilted without using a ruler. I really like the overall effect of it all. In the end it’s about the client being happy, and she was.

Right now I’m quilting a pantograph on a very colorful quilt. You can see it on my Facebook page. It was a perfect quilt to be quilting on this dark stormy day. I love the colors, the brightness, the design. I guess you could say I love the whole thing. The pantograph is Lorien’s “Arabesque.