Wednesday, May 13, 2009

A Flamingo Sunset



Started my next personal quilt. It will probably be called "A Flamingo Sunset" because of the bright color scheme and the subject matter. I'll post a picture of the progress. I just got started last night. There are 33 fabrics used in the quilt, but this is always subject to change. I'm stitching on a background foundation called "sewers cloth" or "soil separator cloth" that is used in trenches for sewers and drainage systems in fields. You can get it at Lowes and it costs about $.08 - $.11 cents a foot depending on the thickness. I like it because it is non-woven and doesn't really stretch. You can draw on it, but still see through it. It is made of a polyester material which is very soft and has a great drape. It doesn't really change the feel of any fabric. If you are interested in a sample, I'll send the first 10 people samples if you send me an email request.

To get started on the quilt, I sketched it in my notebook. I took my drawing to Kinko's and they enlarged it to the dimensions I wanted. This worked out great. They made a few enlargement mistakes, and I kept those too! In all it cost me only about $5.00 for the full size enlargements - both an original and a reverse image. You can see this laying on my table. Then I put two sheets of freezer paper together and traced my lines to make the pattern pieces. I found a repositionable tape that is white by 3M that can be ironed without burning or melting. I got it at Lowes also. I'm using hand dyed fabrics and batiks for this project. Here are my fabric choices.

I am using my pattern on the bottom, or wrong side of the fabric because I want to see how well the colors play together - in case I need to change any. If I were 100% certain of the color placement, I would probably use the freezer paper on top - and wouldn't have had to have a reverse image of my quilt. I made a mistake of cutting too many pieces of the freezer paper pattern out at one time. This makes it hard to find the right piece you need - and I should know better and just cut as I go, but I was too excited to get started. To assemble, I iron the freezer paper pattern on the wrong side of the fabric. Roughly cut a quarter inch seam around as I trim it out and then join the pieces togeter with a basting stitch as I go, basting to the foundation. You can see several pieces here in progress.