I spent the day in a class at Quilting Adventures in Richmond, VA with quilt artist, Pamela Allen. Pamela is from Canada and you can see much of her work at her website.
If you haven’t been to Quilting Adventures, drop what you are doing and go. The shop is great: bright colors, fabulous samples of dolls, quilts and what paints and dyes look like on fabric as well as examples of what you can do with them. Joyce and her team have done an outstanding job with the shop. They are not all things to all quiltmakers, but I think everyone could find something there!
In the class, the topic was Mavericky portraits. Mine is not a self portrait, and is clearly not complete. I took the above photo before I started to quilt it. I “appli-quilted”, which is to say I appliqued the pieces down as I quilted them.
It was a rocky road to quilting as I wanted to use the Glitter thread, but had used very fat batting. I took my initial attempts at stitching out after several frustrating thread breaks. Joyce, the owner of QA, calmly and ably assisted me and replaced the batting with thinner batting and the quilting went much more smoothly. I was able to finish all I wanted to on one machine.
People may be afraid of Glitter, but it is wonderful thread. It gives the sparkle of metallic threads without the headaches. I have tried it, now, on three different machines with minimal issues. It does not like the fat batts, though.
I still want to do some work embellishing, the silk flowers especially need centers of some kind. I also need some kind of hair, but perhaps I will leave her hairless. She is very much still in progress and her personality is not developed, so we will see what comes next.
What’s your favorite thing to do when the thread breaks?
I realized, at last, that sometimes I just have to stop sewing for a while, because really it doesn’t hurt to get up and drink some coffee and go to the bathroom and change the laundry and play with the baby, and then go back to it. I think I made that realization when I was trying to quilt with that maggoty clear thread that I could never make work.
Anyway it makes the quilts crackle.