Last week I was at Asilomar in Pacific Grove, for another Empty Spools quilting class. This year I took a class from Pearl Pereira. Pearl teaches hand appliqué. She's a very good teacher and I learned a lot from her. She has worked a long time to perfect her skills, and to find ways to complete her very intricate appliqué designs. For those of you familiar with hand appliqué, she uses a double freezer paper template and starch to prepare her pieces.
The quilt below is the one we were starting to work on. More specifically, the basket in the middle. (And quite frankly, if I get that middle part finished I will be over-the-moon happy!)
There are 50 different flowers in the quilt, one for each state, and each flower appears twice in the quilt.
Here is my basket completed. (I had to take a picture and send home to MisterStitches, so he could see that I really was working hard!)
Here is one of the times that we were all gathered around Pearl's table, as she showed us a technique. She is demonstrating how to add a tiny sepal to a flower bud with a small Clover iron.
One of the nice things about this class was that we didn't have to bring our sewing machines, which simplified things a little bit. And it's a good thing, too, as I wouldn't have had room on my table for a sewing machine! I had to sort through lots of different fabrics that I'd brought to find just the right piece for my flowers.
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| My work table. What a mess! |
Not everyone in the class was working on the same thing. Some were doing an underwater scene. Tiny, intricate little crab legs!
And look at the detail of the boot and bootlace!
Another underwater scene.
Here I am at lunch with my two table mates: Rita and Chellie.
And here are the flowers I got completed. First is the forget-me-not of Alaska. I've always loved forget-me-nots, and used to have a lot of them growing in my back yard.
These flowers have been formed around the freezer paper templates, then the templates removed, and the various pieces of the "puzzle" are lightly glued together to hold them in place. Here I have them ironed to some freezer paper to keep them intact.
The California poppy is one of the flowers that I like to feature in quilts. I just love seeing them in the spring. It's like seeing the first robin!
BTW, those little flags on the ends of the leaves are supposed to be there. They will get tucked under when I sew them to the base fabric.
Alabama's flower is the camelia. These leaves don't have flags because they have rounded ends, not pointed ones.
The Pua Aloalo of Hawaii was a little tricky to do because of that long skinny stamen! All of these flowers look a little "bare" because they will have enhancing hand embroidery added later.
