Felting and Fiber Studio

I seem to have a fascination with gadgets that I can attach to my sewing machine. Recently I purchased a Flower Stitch foot as well as a Punch Tool. I haven’t taken the Punch Tool out of the box yet but did manage to take some time out to play with the Flower Stitch foot.

I watched a Facebook video of Dale Rollerson/The Thread Studio using the Flower Stitch foot. I love Dale’s videos. If I ever get to Perth, Australia I would love to meet up with her. Probably never happen but one never knows!

https://www.thethreadstudio.com/catalogue/notions/notions4.htm

She sells the Flower Stitch Foot on her website plus a booklet she wrote called Let’s Play with the Flower Stitcher. I’ve been searching the internet to try to find this booklet within the US but so far no such luck has come my way. Postage on the booklet from Australia would cost more than the booklet itself. Sigh…. maybe one day I will run across it and not have to pay so much postage.

There are several of the Flower Stitch Foot devices being sold in the US, however. I purchased mine from The Colorful World of Sewing. They are based in New York state. Here is a link to how the foot looks.

https://www.thecolorfulworldofsewing.com/products/bernina-flower-stitch-foot?_pos=5&_psq=flower+stitch+foot&_ss=e&_v=1.0

They had some good information on their website and said that there were adaptations to my Bernina’s machine shank that would allow me to use this foot. The Flower Stitch Foot and the adaptor price seemed reasonable to me as most of my Bernina presser feet are $100 on up. I went ahead and ordered it.

The first thing I did was make a sampler on some cotton fabric with a stabilizer backing fabric. I played with all my basic stitches and was quite surprised with the results in circular form.

This 10″ x 10″ sampler was done using the largest setting. The setting range on the foot runs from about 1/4” to 3/4” or 6mm-18mm.  I usually stitched around the circles 3 times. As I got into the stitches from #20 to #40, things started getting a little wonky if I went around more than one time. Maybe I was using too large a piece of fabric? Unfortunately, I had to get back to some other projects I was needing to finish up, so the foot sat in its little box for several months. I left this sampler out next to my sewing machine though so I could think about where I wanted to go with it once I could get back to it.

 

What attracted my interest in using this foot for my future projects was the ability to use wash away stabilizer. I want to be able to make separate circles that I could put here and there within the body of a project I am working on. I was concerned however, with how the stitches would hold together once the stabilizer was washed away, so I decided to put a layer of tulle with the wash away stabilizer. I put the two layers into a hoop and got ready to try the foot again. I’d already put the Flower Stitch foot onto my machine, which is quite fiddly to attach. Then I realized I can’t get the hoop under the foot. Not enough clearance like my regular feet give me. That is an inconvenient feature! I have to take the foot off each time I have to take the hoop away from the sewing machine. And I also have to be careful that there is enough clearance for the foot to move the fabric and hoop around and not come into contact with the hoop so it messes up its flow. I think my little Flower Foot is telling me it doesn’t like hoops!

Here is the first sample before washing the stabilizer out and after. Threads used for this one were a mix of rayon and polyester. I played with doing the larger circle in one type of stitch, then doing a smaller circle using another type of stitch inside. Sometimes I would try the small size first, then the larger size. The foot definitely has a mind of its own!

     

 

The addition of the tulle helped keep the stitches in place. One problem I am noticing is that multiple stitch rotations and the thickness the thread is creating is causing the foot to shift so the circle is no longer lining up with itself. I may have to play a bit with my presser bar tension to see if I can keep this from happening because I prefer having the circles more prominent.

Next, I thought I would try using cotton fabric with some thin quilting batting. And I used cotton threads because I wanted to add an acrylic paint wash over the stitches. I wasn’t fond of the brown threads so I switched to grey. This fabric combo seemed to work better as far as keeping the circles in a circle but I still had problems. Again, I think it is because of going around 2 or 3 rotations. I didn’t use a hoop with this one. You can see how the grey flowers are a bit wonky on the 3^rd rotation.

Here is the front and back after applying the acrylic wash.

 

 

I think I like the back better than the front but I really like how the grey cotton threads took the paint. This method could be interesting using white cotton thread with color washes.

Next, I tried some chiffon scarf fabric with the wash away in a hoop. I was attempting to replicate a flower someone had made on a YouTube video. Have to say, I failed spectacularly on this one! I didn’t have enough room in the hoop to make the flower center and have enough fabric around it to use for the petals.  Later I will try this process without a hoop. Maybe I’ll have to use two layers of wash away with the chiffon. And maybe two or more layers of chiffon would also work. I’ll try to find and review that YouTube video and see what fabric they used to make their flower.

   

Next, I got brave and put two layers of wash away in my largest hoop which is a 10 ½” x 11”. I’ve been successfully using this large hoop for my other machine embroidery projects and wondered if it would give the foot more room to stay away from the hoop edge as well as give me more space to add more circles. For this sample I wanted to try out some other threads I have in my stash. I especially wanted to try out some variegated thread and use three different size circle settings. I was still having problems if I went around more than one time. BUT…I was kind of liking how it made things wonky. Who wants perfect circles anyway, right?

I think my big hoop is too much for the foot to try to move around and perhaps that is why the circles went wonky. That plus I was having a hard time keeping the screw tight that holds the circle size in place.  I had to get my screw driver out versus hand tightening it. I think the hoop may have been causing this to happen too. Too much bouncing going on as the foot tried to pivot the fabric and the hoop around the circle. I think I am asking too much of my little foot.

I found some thread that I definitely don’t like to work with. It’s pretty, but it kept breaking and then did this to me…. froze my whole machine up, needle down. Ugh!

Look at how wonky most of these are!

Since I didn’t add tulle or chiffon to the two wash away layers, I was going to have to attach each circle to something to keep it from falling apart when I rinsed it. I decided to just do some freehand machine circles to get everything connected. One nice thing about using wash away is that you can cut things apart once it dries because it gets kind of stiff, so some of these could become individual circles.

   

 

It’s been interesting and fun playing with the Flower Stitch foot!  I still have some ideas I want to try out, like trying to figure out how to do multiple stitch rounds and not have it go off kilter and making a sampler of each stitch in the different sizes available. Mainly I want to be able to create these shapes as individual circle pieces so I can incorporate them into my art quilts or my collages. I definitely need more practice with it!

I love my toys!

Happy creating and best wishes to you all in 2026!

Tesi Vaara

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My local quilt guild had a male speaker a couple of months ago. I really enjoyed his presentation, his honesty and his work. His name is Mathew Boudreaux, aka Mx Domestic. He and Tara J. Curtis have written a book called Fabric Weaving and Mathew has also created a new weaving tool, Mx Weaver, that works quite well with his weaving process. He has quite a few videos on YouTube as well. He also has an online fabric shop and I really love his fabric choices. I’ve even purchased a few of his traditional quilt kits because I loved the fabric choices. And on Saturdays he has been doing a Facebook live that I enjoy watching.

https://mxdomestic.com/collections/mx-domestic

The book has a large number of projects using a variety of different types of weaves. I thought I would try a tumbling block (aka triaxial) weave. His project suggests cutting it up and making it into coasters. I love the weaving on the cover!

First thing I had to do was draw a grid. This will be attached to a piece of 24” x 30” foam core board that is at least ½” thick as you will be pinning into it. This is a photo of my second grid drawing. The first I didn’t have the lines extended out to all the edges which made it difficult to line the fabric strips up with. As I progressed with the weave, I found out how important that detail was! One good thing is that I can reuse this grid later.

This project required 3 different fabrics, light, medium and dark. I decided I wanted to work with a turquoise pallet.

Once I picked my fabrics, I needed to cut them into 1” wide strips and then use my ½” bias tape maker to make 12 strips out of each color.

Photo of my 1/2″ bias tape tool doing it’s job!

Photo of all the medium color fabric strips ready to go!

Lots of prep to do prior to any actual weaving…

Finally I could start laying the strips down on the grid. First the medium color was placed vertically . The drawn grid lines are 1” apart, so 2 strips fit in each section.

This photo shows the first layer going down onto the grid.

Layer #2 requires using the Mx Weave tool and starting to work diagonally. Here is a photo with the Mx Weave tool.

Second layer progress…

2^nd layer complete

Now for the 3^rd and final weave. I switched to the smaller Mx Weave tool for the third layer and used my Purple Thang to help get the tip through in the proper places.

Purple Thang photo

1st couple of rows of fabric 3…

I’m getting excited to see the tumbling block pattern come to life! Hope I’m not boring you with all my progress photos. I found the whole process fascinating!

When I got to this point, I realized a few mistakes that I had made along the way.

One blatant one to my eye was that the strips were not laying in a straight line from edge to edge. You can see in the above photo how the blocks are bigger on the right side. It’s an interesting effect but not what I was looking for in this project. And since my drawn edge lines didn’t extend out far enough past the ends of fabric #2, I couldn’t see what I was doing. And all those pins to deal with! I tried to fix things and finally decided I would start the 3rd layer over again after I redrew the grid to make it bigger. This was a pretty scary move at this point because I had to remove all those pins. Worse case scenario was that I would have to start all over again and I was prepared to do that if necessary.

I was successful in transferring the 2 layers to the new grid. I think it was a good move to do this as I was much more pleased with the new block consistency.

And here it is with all 3 layers woven together.

Much more consistency after redoing layer #3. I can live with this version!

I had laid some woven fusible interfacing down before I started adding the strips. Once I removed all the pins, I taped the edges, gave it a good steaming to get the fusible interfacing to adhere a bit and then sewed all around the edges to keep it from coming apart.

Now…onto the coasters. How in the world could I cut this up to make coasters??? Oh my.

But I did. These are almost 6″ x 6″ which is a bit large for a coaster but here they are. All done!

I learned a lot from Mathew’s process. I wish I had taken a class from him first, as I’m sure he would have passed on a lot of his success secrets and do’s and don’ts. I will probably try another one or two of his woven projects from his book.  That was fun!

Happy creating!
Tesi Vaara

I’ve been trying to make some sunflowers using Aquamesh Washaway embroidery stabilizer. This method allows me to make individual flowers that I can move around on the wall hanging I am making before I figure out their final placement. I’ve got 6 of them made in varying sizes and have decided I don’t really like the ones I’ve made so far so I want to try something a bit different.

Here is a photo that I used to draw out the design on the left side of the drawing. I love this sunflower color.

After studying the petals on my sunflower photos, it seemed like I should make layers. I drew out three layers and highlighted the petals I wanted to stitch in each layer. Flower #1 are all the petals on the first layer, flower #2 are the petals on the second layer and #3 are ones behind both.

Then I got the idea to try to print a design onto my Aquamesh Washaway embroidery stabilizer so that I don’t have to keep redrawing the layers, if my layer idea works. I was a bit worried about how the ink would act for the end product, especially since I would be dipping it into water. The stabilizer is not stiff enough to run through the printer on its own, so I thought I would iron it to a piece of freezer paper that I cut to 8 ½” x 11”. I cut the Washaway to that same measurement, then ironed them together. The Washaway shrunk about an 1/8” all around. Note to self…maybe cut washaway larger than the freezer paper, then recut the edges. Maybe it won’t matter. (It didn’t). I definitely will need to scotch tape the feeding edge so it will hopefully go smoothly into the printer. Now…where is my tape?? Guess I need to buy some more of that. The first attempt to get this through the printer failed, the two pieces wouldn’t feed. But good to go on the second attempt, although I should have turned the piece I was copying from around so I had more space to hoop up flower #1.

I’m going to use Sulky 30 wt 100% cotton thread on this sample.

Here I’ve got the washaway in the hoop, ready to start sewing. (I had to add a bit of washaway above petal layer #1 so it would stay tight in the hoop).

Ugh! My Bernina 770 is yelling at me! Oil me! Oil me! Oil me!

Don’t you just get ticked off when that happens??

Oiling your sewing machine is a necessary evil, especially when doing this type of embroidery work. I just don’t like doing it, especially right when I want to start sewing! About 10 minutes later and a very bad language conversation with my bobbin case, I finally got to do some stitching.

I would straight stitch the petals, then go back and zigzag stitch over them.

All the threads need to be connected to other threads otherwise they will just unravel when you rinse the washaway out.

 

That being said, after I stitched the individual petals so they would hold together, I realized that I needed to somehow connect the petals in each one to the center, otherwise they’d just be flopping around after I removed the washaway. So, I cut a square of tulle, placed it behind each petal  layer and stitched it down hopefully enough to hold the petals together. I wasn’t too worried about how the center looked at this point in time, I just needed it to be structurally sound. Then I trimmed the tulle down in the shape of the center stitching. When I drop these into water to remove the washaway, the tulle should hold them together. Fingers crossed anyway!

I stitched over each layer with a darker thread to give a bit of contrast and then cut off the other flower drawing because I want to see how this is going to look before I make any more sunflowers. I’m not really happy with it so far. I don’t like how the thread is stitching up, nor the color.

After cutting most of the washaway off and rinsing the washaway out, I layered the 3 layers and I can see that some of the inkjet ink remained so the thread appears darker. I’m disappointed with that but maybe I can add some acrylic paint to the petals once they dry. It’s also very wet at this point and may lighten up when dry.

It did lighten up when dry. Looks more like a multi legged starfish to me.

If I want to make a starfish in the future I think I can do it! My petals sure look like starfish legs to me!

I’m going to paint my sample.

I used my Posca acrylic pens and I like it better, but it’s still not what I am looking for in the flower I want to put into my project. This is about 2” wide. I think my layer idea was successful though and that this technique might work for a different type of flower. It does have lots of dimensionality. It’s quite stiff from the glue in the washaway that doesn’t all get rinsed out.

That was a fun learning experience.

But, back to the drawing board…

Happy Creating!
Tesi Vaara

In July of 2025, the Advanced Studies in Experimental Stitch (L3) course that I’ve been participating in since Sept of 2022 will come to an end. We’ll have an exhibition of the work that 5 students in the course have done on July 19^th and 20^th at Gail Harker’s studio in LaConner, WA USA. https://gailcreativestudies.com/. Stop on by if you’re in the area.

I’m looking forward to finishing the course and having some free time to get back to some other projects that have been gathering dust. I have a clothesline strung across the length of my studio where I pin projects that I don’t want to forget about (or things that I don’t want to lose track of) and I enjoy looking at them when I walk by.

 

Here is a closer look at unfinished projects on the floor that I trip over on my way to the laundry room.

Two projects on my clothesline that I really want to finish just need to be quilted.

One of them is a small scene of city buildings (16″ x 16″) that I made using a purchased stencil from Stencil Girl Products . https://www.stencilgirlproducts.com/

I colored the buildings using Inktense with Aloe Vera gel to keep the color from migrating into the next building.

The other small quilt (16″ x 16″) was also made using a purchased stencil from Stencil Girl. This one started my interest into stitch drawing. I made this one because I thought the city needed to have people with it.

I must have made these two pieces in the dead of winter. I’m not sure how I got so focused on grey! Not much color going on with my people. Perhaps before I quilt this one, I will add some color to the people’s clothing. This one was fun to make though. All the people are hand stitched using one strand of DMC floss. They look like they are really enjoying their winter.

A direction I want to go into next is doing machine stitched figures. I bought a book by Rosie James called Stitch Draw. I like the simplicity of her work and all her loose threads. My plan is to use old family photos and stitch draw them.

Hopefully later this year I can show you some progress on cleaning up my UFO pile. I look forward to revisiting it, but that will all have to wait until AFTER July.

Happy creating!
Tesi Vaara

I participated in the card exchange again this year and got matched up with Ruth Lane. Of course, I put off making her card until she sent me an email telling me that my card was going out in the mail very soon.  Nothing like pressure to get things done!

I didn’t really want to make something that could only be displayed at Christmas time. But I knew I wanted red in it. I have several bins of hand dyed fabrics so I started looking there and found this piece.

Since I didn’t have a lot of time, I thought I might try fusing some shapes onto this background. I have quite a bit of fussy cut shapes that had already been fused to Wonder Under so I started playing with those.

I first tried using just the circles and it wasn’t doing much for me. Then I came across the bag of fussy cut fish and thought these would become my Christmas Fishies!

Then I thought it needed some seaweed so I found some fancy yarn that I thought might help to bring some of the blue color in.

Next, I needed to quilt it and zig zag the edges and get it put onto cardstock.

Ta-Da! Christmas Fishies all ready to be mailed off. Approximately 5″ x 6 1/2″.

Hope you all had a marvelous Christmas!

Happy New Year!

Tesi Vaara

I’m working on some floral type pieces that I want to incorporate stems into. There are lots of choices out there to make cords or plain old stitched stems, but Sue Spargo started selling a tool called a Mini Cordsmith that makes I-cords. I’ve made I-cords using knitting needles before but this little tool intrigued me. Would it be easier than using knitting needles which I find kind of fiddly to work with??  I had to see for myself so I sent off for one.

When it arrived, I was excited to try it out. I had a hard time figuring out how to use it at first but once I got the hang of it, I was off to the races, sort of…

Here is my first attempt. Look at all those humps and bumps and poor tension! Yikes! Well…no stem is perfect in nature anyway, right?

Once I got the hang of looping the yarn more consistently around the tines, I tried out several different yarns and threads that I had in my stash.

You can make round I-cord or flat I-cord based off how you place the thread or yarn around the tines. After trying several of my yarns and threads, I felt that the Mini Cordsmith was a bit limiting in the yarn size that it would accommodate.

Shiny yarns made into round I-cord and flat I-cord:

Shiny metallic thread:

Sock yarn (I’ve got LOTS of sock yarn)

Then I saw Sue Spargo had an Original Cordsmith that was bigger!!! I had to buy that one as well because I was having trouble using yarn larger than sock yarn with the Mini. I also had to make a trip to a local yarn shop to see if I could find some yarns that might make interesting I- cords. Always a fun thing to do, right??

https://www.suespargo.com/shop/cordsmith-sue-spargo-exclusive-58699?category=141&search=i+cord#attr=45752

There are videos on this link showing how to use the tool.

 

I think the Mini will work great for stems on smaller pieces and the Original may produce some interesting larger I-cord pieces that can be incorporated into mixed media pieces. I am thinking I can also machine zig zag over some of them and add another layer of threads or yarn to give them more texture and color. More exploration needs to be done in that arena!

This yarn was used with the Original Cordsmith. It looks like it would make great stems using it straight from the ball although it is quite soft and fluffy and may be hard to stitch to cloth without losing some of its structure. I was surprised how lovely it worked up into the round I-cord shape and I really like the variegation flowing through it. The flat I-cord could work for the stems on some larger flowers. Merino wool. Yummy stuff.

These tools are also very portable.

I hope to show you how I used some of my I-cords on a future project!

 

Happy Fall everyone!
Tesi Vaara

Quite a few months ago, the Program Chair for my local quilt guild (Camano Island Quilters) asked me if I would be willing to do a trunk show of my quilts. I had never done anything like that before so I said “Yes, of course!” I was nervous about doing it for the first time, but quilter’s are my people!

As the day drew nearer, I thought I’d better start looking for all the quilts I still had in my possession after beginning quilt making in the late 1980’s and started piling them up on my studio floor.  I was quite surprised to see how many traditional quilts were added to the pile. I had totally forgotten I had made some of them.

I had to figure out how I wanted to give my little “talk” and decided that I would look at my quilting as a journey and start with my traditional quilts and end with my art quilts.

I first began quilting because I was attracted to Amish quilts. I found 3 small Amish wall hangings that I had finished and hand quilted. When I began quilting, there was still a lot of controversy over hand versus machine quilting. Thankfully, machine quilting is widely accepted today!

Over the next few years, I took many classes from a wide variety of teachers mostly at quilt shops near my home.  I learned that I wasn’t very good at fabric color choices and that sewing ¼” seams and matching points correctly was challenging for me. I have great respect for traditional quilters and their skills!

At one point I got into making foundation paper pieced miniature quilts, thinking that would be a faster, more efficient way to complete a quilt. This piece was probably made in the late 1990’s. The foundation paper was still in it and when I went to remove it, sadly many of the seams started coming apart. I did finish quilting it and put a facing on it (versus a binding) and it hangs on my wall. It is flawed but still precious to me.

12” x 12” (late 1990’s maybe?)

One lament I have after going through my pile of quilts was that I had no information about them. There was no label on them about when they were made, no notes about what class or book or pattern they referred to, no name of who quilted them.  It was hard to do a timeline without that information.

(Another lament is that I didn’t take a photo of each one before I packed them away after the trunk show).

As I went through my quilt pile, I found several tops that had been pieced but not quilted. I even found a couple of pieced backs already made for them. I decided I had to get them finished so I could hang them around the house.  I even found one that had been machine quilted but just needed a binding sewn onto it.

I texted my long arm quilter and prewarned her that I’d have at least 4 quilts that I wanted her to quilt after the trunk show was over. I spent several days piecing quilt backs and finally dropped them off to her. It’s amazing how much fabric is needed for the backs. You can buy fabric that is 108” wide but I try to use up what fabric I have on hand which results in lots of seams and math calculations to make sure the back is big enough.

She finished quilting them in less than 2 weeks’ time! She’s FAST!

Then I needed to get busy and focus on getting the labels, bindings and hanging sleeves sewn on.

Two of the 4 quilts have been entered into my upcoming local quilt guilds’ first quilt show since the 2020 Pandemic – the Black and White Sampler and the Hunter’s Moon. It’ll be fun to see them hanging in a show.

62” x 62” Black and White Sampler (early 2000’s maybe)

68” X 68” Stars (late 90’s maybe)

44” x 60” Wonky log cabin (made within the last 10 years)

92” x 92” Hunter’s Star (finished 2024 but took about 4 years to get there)

Back in Sept of 2023, I wrote about this Hunter’s Star quilt on my blog post asking what color other people preferred and most people preferred the mid-range blue for the border. I finally went with the light blue border. It was my favorite but I will have to make a new bed skirt to go with it.

Hunter’s Star

I also entered my latest Full Moon art quilt into the show.
32” x 37” Snow Moon (2022)

 

It was fun to do the trunk show for my guild and to have the opportunity to revisit my quilt journey. Now all my traditional quilts are stored together in one location and my art quilts are in another. I can hopefully continue being organized going forward so I can find them easily when I look for them.

And lesson learned about labeling finished projects and putting crucial information in with the unfinished projects!

Tesi Vaara

The other day I was browsing through my UFO knitting projects trying to figure out if there was something easy that I could work on and possibly finish. Well, that thought right there is laughable. EASY?? I think so many UFO’s become UFO’s because the project became difficult to finish and that’s why it was abandoned.

I thought I might try to finish a simple poncho that I had started over 10 years ago so I pulled it off the stack. To my dismay, I found it had been visited by a moth that had eaten away a small portion about 2 inches from the start as well as snacking on some of the yarn in the ball. Back into the bag the poncho went while I decided my next steps. I forgot to take a photo of the damage done.  I was quite sad. I’ve lived in my house over 30 years and have never seen any moth holes until now.

 

(Here is a photo of a moth visit in another UFO that I found later…) Look familiar to anyone??

More about this UFO at the end of this blogpost.

I thought about how to proceed for a couple more days. Finally, I decided to rip out the first two inches of the poncho to get to the other side of the hole and to knit another two inches onto the other end. Fortunately, I had plenty of yarn left. Ripping out the first two inches was not as easy as I thought it should be. The edges were all twisted and that made it really difficult to rip back. And there were places where I had split the yarn and had to actually cut the yarn to remove it. I was really questioning my knitting skills at this point when I looked at the fabric I had created. Wow, I did such an awful job on a simple stockinette stitch on a plain rectangle!

After beating myself up for doing such a poor knitting job, I finally remembered that I had started this simple project so I could learn a new edge stitch as well as learn how to do pick knitting (Continental) versus throw knitting (English). And I have to say that I failed at both new learnings. I would forget that I did the edge stitch and revert back to just heading back the other way when I turned my work. And my pick stitching and tension are horrendous. It looks like I finally just went back to throwing my stitches and was still hit or miss on that edge stitch.

I get good tension when I throw my yarn. So, part of the poncho looked good and part looked like I should have just ripped it out and started over.

My next thought was maybe I could block out all the imperfections. I think the yarn is a Super Wash wool, although I don’t really know since I didn’t have any labels for it. Where do those labels always disappear to? Blocking the wet poncho out into the correct dimensions was very challenging, but happily I finally had some success with that. It measures 22” x 50”.

As it dried, many of the flaw’s kind of worked themselves out. You have to love wool for its ability to do that.

Here is the finished poncho. I’m quite happy with it. Just a plain everyday type poncho.

When I was a teenager, my Mom knit a poncho for me and I wore it all the time. I loved it. I have no idea what happened to it. One day I decided to find a pattern similar to it and try to make something in its likeness. I think it is a superwash wool too. I may have blogged about this poncho before, but here is a photo of it again. It makes me smile.

I should probably go look at it closer and make sure the moths haven’t been visiting it along with all my other wool pieces. Think I’ll stick it into a plastic bag and then into the freezer for a day or two.

The first photo of the moth hole is one of two I found in a crocheted cardigan that I am trying to finish up. I don’t crochet as much as I knit so I’ve had some new learnings on this project and I see why it became a UFO. It will also be a bit more challenging to repair those holes as I can’t rip things out like I did with the poncho. The hole in the front is  by that yellow clip on the bottom right side. The other is on the back. Definitely some mending in my future before I can wear this cardigan.  Hopefully sooner rather than later as it is a lovely weight for this time of year. And yes I do love blue!

That’s my journey for now.

Hope you are all enjoying the arrival of Spring!

Tesi Vaara

 

Another year almost behind us. Time goes so quickly these days, at least for me! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. And may 2024 bring much joy and creativity to your lives!

I recently signed up for an online class with Wen Redmond. http://www.wenredmond.com/ through Fiber Arts Take Two. https://www.fibreartstaketwo.com/ FATT really present their courses very professionally. And they’ve got wonderful artist interviews on their YouTube channel. Wen’s course is called Photos, Fabric and Mixed Media. I’ve been wanting to focus more on using photos in my artwork and I think I will be learning a lot from this course. Wen is very generous with her methods of achieving remarkable fiber art.

One of my goals this coming year is to get good at using Photoshop and other apps of that nature. In November I decided to subscribe to Photoshop and once I got it loaded to my old laptop (2017) all sorts of problems occurred. I now have a new laptop. Then once I got everything transferred from my old laptop to the new laptop it wouldn’t connect to the internet! I now have a new modem. It was as old as my laptop was! So after about 3 weeks of frustration, I’m all up to date and maybe good for another 5 years or so.

I kind of lost my creative mojo while dealing with all that computer techy stuff. Hopefully I’m back on track again.

Last week I spent some time following Wen’s first module of her class. It focused on getting your fodder prepared for using in the upcoming modules. She uses acrylic paints watered down quite a bit so she can get some nice soft washes going to print on. I tried painting on a variety of cloth, interfacings and paper to see what I could achieve and hopefully give me a wide range of substrates. Wen said not to worry about the color wheel when choosing your paint colors, just play. But I decided to use a color scheme that I hadn’t explored yet so I could also use my fodder for my Gail Harker L3 course.

I struggled with getting my paint thin enough to do a wash. I also seem to have a hard time making things be lighter and softer with the idea of printing on them. Maybe once I learn more about Photoshop I’ll be able to lighten things up there. Hopefully I have enough usable fodder for Wen’s future teachings.

I went with a Tetrads scheme from a square: Yellow, violet, red orange and blue green. I tried to use up some craft paints a friend had gifted me that were beginning to dry out. And all the substrates take the paint so differently. The final results were almost always a surprise which was fun!

This is Lutradur:

This is cotton twill:

This is watercolor paper:

This is the plastic that some of the painted pieces were laying on:

Another plastic one. Even though these are on plastic, the photos of them can be saved, manipulated in an app and printed onto another substrate. The plastic images are fascinating to me.

And some tissue paper:

Anyway, I had a LOT of fun painting last week as you can see.

I decided I’d play a bit more and try to make a quick little collage. That bright yellow and orange piece on top of the above pile caught my eye to use as a background piece.

This is now a combination of cotton, cheesecloth, some kind of a rice paper and newspaper.

I added a bit of silk organza:

The last photo is as far as I’ve gotten on this little collage.

It reminds me of a ship sailing off into the sunset in shallow waters.

I’ll try to remember to post it after I finish it.

Happy New Year!

Tesi Vaara

 

 

I’m not a huge fan of piecing traditional quilt blocks together. I do, however, have a great appreciation of their beauty and craftsmanship. It’s really hard to sew all those ¼” seams together and make everything match up correctly! So much easier to make Art quilts where all that precision may not be necessary. And who doesn’t love having a handmade quilt on one’s bed??

I’ve been attending a quilt retreat (which gathers three times a year) near my home for over 10 years. One of the attendees used to work in a quilt store and made LOTS of quilts. I got to admire them from across the room as she built them and put them up on her design wall. One pattern I fell in love with was the Hunter’s Star. There are so many variations to this pattern. I vowed to myself that if I ever made myself a bed quilt, I wanted it to be using this pattern.

Fast forward a couple of years…a quilt shop near me was going out of business and had great sales on all their fabric. I knew if I was going to make a Hunter’s Star quilt, I wanted it to be blues on a white background. So, I bought a bunch of bolt ends in blues at a great price. Then they sat for a couple of more years. I finally decided to start working on it about 3 or 4 years ago. I mostly worked on it at the retreats, so it has been fairly slow going.

At my last retreat in August, I finally got all the blocks sewn together. Yay! I have to fess up and say that all the points aren’t perfect, but I was pretty pleased with how flat everything laid.

I was also happy to have it sewn together at the retreat so I could get input from the others about the borders. What fabric to use and how wide should I make the borders and do I need two borders. Always good to have other eyes look at it.

I decided to go with two borders, the inner border being a solid dark blue that is different from the fabrics in the blocks and making it 1” in width. The outer border will be 5” wide and I will use the solid light blue that is used in the block. I’m hoping I’ll have enough of that solid light blue to use for the quilt binding. Heaven forbid I have to buy MORE fabric!

Here is a photo of the quilt after sewing the first border on.

Sorry about the background and wonkiness of this photo. I was standing on a rickety ladder trying to get the whole thing in the frame. At this point this quilt measures 82 ½” x 82 ½” so it’s quite large.

I ran into a dilemma after I took this photo. I decided to audition my outer border choices again before I started cutting fabric. I tried the medium blue speckled fabric that is in the block and was kind of intrigued with how it looked.

Here is the medium solid blue.

And here is the medium speckled blue.

I then got the bright idea to lay the quilt out on my bed and see how those two fabrics looked with the bed skirt I have. Good thing I did that! If I was going to hang this quilt on a wall, I’d probably go with the lighter blue as I feel that one pops the colors a  bit more, but on my bed things looked different when placed next to my dark blue bed skirt!

Here it is with the solid blue border. The bed skirt is navy blue.

And here it is with the speckled blue border.

I think I might go with the speckled blue after seeing it on the bed. And now I’m not sure I like the 1” dark blue inner border. It’s all looking like I have three borders on the quilt. Maybe the inner one needs to be a tad bit thinner. But I’m not sure this mid blue is THE ONE either.

Guess this project will remain another one of my UFO’s until I can get back to it. And here I thought I could get this done in one sitting. Joke’s on me!

I’ve always been told to make design decisions visually and I think that rule helped me out a lot on this one. I’m glad I haven’t cut the lighter blue into border lengths yet. I’ll need more thinking before I figure this one out.

My sister suggested that I may need another color bed skirt OR I could add another 2 rows of blocks to each side (ugh!) and don’t have borders, just the binding. The new bed skirt idea sounds more appealing than making 16 more blocks!

Which border do YOU like best and why??

Here is another bed quilt that I made from blue Japanese fabrics that I had collected over the years and finally got to use. No border on this one so it looks okay with the bed skirt. I should have thrown my matching pillowcase covers on so it looked more like a bed! I love this quilt.

And another bed quilt I made and have not put on the bed yet. It seems like it should go on a wall more than a bed. It was a UFO that I started years before the Hunter’s Star quilt and finally finished. Not my favorite but it’s DONE! Not sure it would look very good with my navy blue bed skirt either since the background is black. Again, sorry for the crummy photo.

I’ve got one more bed size quilt that I want to make and it is about ½ way finished. I’ll get it done someday. It won’t look good with my current bed skirt either!

So, until I can get back to my Hunter’s Star quilt, I’ll put it back into the UFO pile along with these other projects I hope to get to one day.

How big is your UFO pile???

Happy creating!
Tesi Vaara