Be Gentle, I am sharing my work

I said in an earlier post that I attended a class this past weekend that really stretched my skills and tested my desire for art quilts. I was attracted to the class for two reasons, a very dear friend was the hostess and invited me to share the experience and an 'overnight'. Also irises are my favorite flower. I won't subject myself to the test though, the above and below piece were made by the instructor. She was teaching the technique of applique and using paints to blend the colors. The thing that makes this technique so difficult is that you use fabric for each one of the color changes on this piece. You start out with 6 different shades of purple, 6 different shades of green and a couple shades of blue. You put a fusible backing on the fabric and iron the pieces on the background fabric, following a pattern, kind of like putting a puzzle together only using an iron, fabric and paint.

You can see that she quilted her piece after she finished.

These two pictures are of my piece. The one above is how it looked before I started blending the edges with paint. You can more clearly see the small pieces of different colored fabric on this piece. I hadn't put the stems or grass on it yet but this is about how far I got in the class. She did start me with my painting and blending before we left so I decided to finish it right away last night, before the paint dried since I don't have any paints and wasn't planning on buying my own. I did my best blending and mixing the paints to complete the project and blend the areas where the colors meet.

Here is my piece finished. Like I said, I blended the colors with the paint last night and today I added the leaves and stems. I don't plan on quilting mine though. I really don't enjoy machine quilting. I am not very skilled at it either but am not interested in practicing to get better. I always take my quilts to a quilter and she does that part. What I am thinking of doing is stretching this piece on a canvas and just hanging it.

I have taken several classes since retirement and I am kind of getting to know the kind of quilting I like to do. I have worked in applique 3 times, and I am finding that it really isn't a technique that I enjoy. First of all I don't like cutting out little pieces and then fusing them on another fabric. Usually you need to use the zig-zag technique around the pieces to make them stay on the quilt and I don't enjoy that part of applique projects. I don't enjoy the look that well either. I DO enjoy doing quilt piecing in a pattern though. I like cutting up strips and sewing them together for blocks and making quilts right now so I think I will stick to that for a while.

SO, like I said in the beginning, be gentle with your assessment of my project. I will continue to share other projects as I expand my quilting experience.