EAA 2023 Quilt Show Entries

I entered 4 quilts in this year's EAA Quilt Show.

Day at Loon Lake

 

Farmer's Wife: Pandemic Ed.

And 2 challenge quilts that are black-white+1 other color:

 

Winter Nights (Convergence)

 

Dancing Crane 

  I also helped make the raffle quilt "Izzy's Garden" with Laura Ramseier, Janice Potraz, and Linda Z.

It is pictured above with the winner, Cheryl Edis (sp?)

Congrats to all on another successful show!

Day at Loon Lake Quilt is Complete!

 

Day at Loon Lake Quilt

 

Complete with the label in the lower right corner.  This style of label is easily readable by flipping up the corner.

 

 

On the label, I made note of the wool batting -- in case anyone int he future thinks they want to wash it. 

I have to say that I was really impressed with this Quilter's Dream Wool Batt.  I am looking forward to working with it again - on a bed quilt.

 

The pattern is by Nancy Davis Murty for Bee Creative Studios. 

This quilt has been at least 15 years in the making, so the pattern will be hard to find.

Here's a close-up of each block (for the record):

 

Quilting from the back side.

Other posts about this quilt:

Quilting Deep Water on the Loon Lake Quilt (2022)

Quilting the Elements: Air and Water (2022)

Next Steps on The Loon Lake Quilt (2022)

A Few Small Repairs on the Loon Lake Quilt: Replacing the Misfit Log (2021)

Day at Loon Lake Quilt Top is Complete! (2020)

Day at the Lake Quilt is coming along -Top Third is Done - Turtle and Perch Blocks Done (2020)

Progress on The Loon Lake Quilt (2017)

Thread Painting at Lake Lucerne Quilt Camp 2016 : Part 2 (2016)

Progress on Day at Loon Lake Quilt (2016)

Resurrection of Day at Loon Lake Quilt (2016)

Quilting Deep Water on the Loon Lake Quilt

 

 I was stuck on this project the last few weeks, wondering what to do with the underwater blocks.  I concluded that my first choice of water motif (a seaweed-y feathery design) was not going to work so well.   I realized the water surface and sky blocks seem to be to pressed down, not letting the puffy wool batt do it's thing, providing raised areas around the many objects in this quilt.  So I had to re-group and come up with Plan B.

Surfing the web one day, I stumbled across this commercial quilt, and I thought would be a good choice -- easy to do, and reflecting the water reeds and grasses.

 

So I laid out the quilt and took some thrums (leftover strings from weaving that are otherwise too short to keep, but still manage to be useful) and laid them out where I wanted the stitching.  

 

Then I chalked a line next to the strings.  Chalk is the best marking took in this case because it stays on long enough to get the stitching done, and easily brushes off afterwards, leaving no permanent marks.

 

The next task is to stitch on those chalked lines.  

Since these were more or less straight-ish lines with slight curves, I used a regular foot, though I think I would have been happioer with the good ol' free-motion foot. 

Here are some of the results:

 

Nice and open stitching, while allowing the wool batt to do it's thing underneath ...

 

... making it look 3D.

I also finished the gravel at the bottom of the quilt, so hopefully, I'll be able to do the binding during Christmas week!

Looking forward to another finish!

Quilting the Elements: Air and Water

Step-by-step, I am making steady progress on The Loon Lake Quilt.  This weekend, I quilted the backgrounds for the Air and surface of the lake blocks.

Background quilting for AIR.

The quilt paper with cloud motifs sewn onto the background of the sky blocks. 

I used a light colored blue and lilac thread that blends in nicely with the sky colors-- which you can sort of see in the photo at the top of this post.

 I spent the morning tracking down a suitable cloud motif, then right-sizing it and then tracing it out onto quilting paper.  All that tracing is time well spent in getting to know the motif, putting it into muscle memory, so that it's easier to stitch out when I get to that stage. 

Here I am stitching the clouds onto the sky blocks.  From this angle, they kind of look like bat wings -- Or maybe that's just late October spilling through?

The quilt paper is tissue paper that I can sew through and see through -- which allows me to avoid elements in the quilt that I do NOT want to sew over.   In the case above, I did NOT want to sew clouds over the green hills.   The quilting tissue paper also tears off easily -- esp. after it's been perforated with the stitches.  Having the lines drawn on paper gives me a road map for sewing, otherwise I get lost.  

Here's the goldfinch.  The clouds just happened to line up nicely to outline his head.  I did not stitch clouds over the irises.  

 

Here it is with the tissue paper torn off.  

 

Background quilting for WATER. 

I used a different motif for the surface of the water on the lake.  

Again, the tissue paper helped me place the motifs while avoiding the appliques elements of the quilt-- like loons and water lilies and dragon flies.

 

Here is the same block with the paper torn off.  

 

In real life, the loon is popping out of the quilt, while the background is pushed back.   

Now to figurte out what to do with the remaining blocks ...

 

Next Steps on The Loon Lake Quilt

Progress on Day at Loon Lake Quilt

This is the quilt I've been working on lately, but I could not take it to Quilt Camp because it's not a good set-up there with with round tables.   This is where it stands now ... I've done a fair amount of work on it, though it's hard to tell from the last time it appeared on Sweet Leaf Notebook.

Since then, I've swapped out a few fabrics for what I felt were better choices -- on the log (again) and some of the lily pad leaves.

 

With the top sandwiched with batting and backing, the next step is to start stitching through all the layers with the quilting.  At this point, I stitched-in-the-ditch along the edges of each block to add some stability before I did the rest of the quilting.  The photo above shows in red (dramatic, but only for the purposes of illustration) where I stitched along those block edges.  In actuality, I used clear thread.

The next task was to outline all the appliqued elements.  The wool batting (Quilter's Dream) has been wonderful to sew through, and it makes thing pop out 3D style once they are outlined in stitch.  In the photo above, I quickly outlined those elements in read (again) to give you and idea of what I did this weekend.  It's not hard work. It just takes time and patience.  I've been working 1 block at a time, matching the outlining thread with the background of each block.  

Note: This is an older photo with some of the older fabric colors for the log.  

In this photo, you can see the stitched outline around the loon, and how it pushes the background down, and allows the loon to pop up, giving that 3D effect.

Here is one of the fish.  Some of the stitching (embroidery) happened BEFORE layered with batting and backing.  That stitching adds dimension and detail, but is relatively flat in the grand scheme of things because it's not attached to the backing or the batting layers.  It is limited to the quilt top layer.  Here again, you can see the outline stitching that makes this fish pop out of the background.

Here's the third fish.

The next step is to figure out what to quilt into the backgrounds.  I have some ideas ... but I'll save that for another post.  More to come!