Awards at the Bay City Quilt Show in Michigan

Last weekend we had the local Bay Heritage Quilt Show. Many wonderful quilts were shown by great quilters! A lot of traditional pieces and some more artistic like mine. I was very lucky and privileged to receive Best of Show, Small Piece, Best Use of Color and Best Machine Applique, Individual, for my latest piece called Afternoon Delight. It is a design I created from photos taken in the south of France on a small island in the Mediterranean Sea called Porquerolles. The building in the picture was an ugly sort of peachy color with some gray shutters. I didn't think about the fact when trying to decide on my next project that I could actually change the color of the building and the shutters. So of course I had to choose an orange batik. The shutters were from a McKenna Ryan fabric with great texture, a light blue viney kind of fabric. I liked the way they looked when I was designing the piece.


The beige ground is a textural batik that I thought would be interesting to top-stitch using a sort of dark variegated thread in stone pattern. The bikes were fabric first and fabric painted to get the detail. I left out lots of detail in the design such as extra pedals and a flower pot that was behind the bikes. It was a fun piece to do. The fabric paint is what gives the design depth.



I have been working on getting my Bernina 820 functional for me. At the Viking store in Ann Arbor Kris told me I might try using thread that has long staples, something I didn't know anything about before he mentioned this. He explained that since the machine was a larger more commercial size the fibers that make up the thread need to be longer or they might break during usage. So this sounded logical. My mom had some Mettler thread, and also some Isocord, YLi, and others I don't remember so I tried them. So far the machine has been sewing well. I got the tension set using mono-filament in my bobbin so the top thread doesn't show up on the bottom of the quilt. So far, so good. We will see how it sews on my next design after I fabric paint it. That seemed to be a bit of an issue for the machine. But I will keep on trying whatever I need to make it work. It's only been about 10 months now. We'll give it a couple more. It's other features are so great!

If anyone does fabric painting and top-stitching and can let me know what kind of machine they are using, I would love to hear from you about it! Thanks.