Today's progress

So this is how the Celtic applique looks finished. The third and last lesson was loaded today about how to finish the table runner. Instead on working on finishing this I spent this morning with redrafting my doodle from the other day into a workable pattern.


The final size of this comes out to be about 18 1/2" for the design itself. At first I thought I could work it to be a 40" wall hanging, but the proportions of the bias would be off. One option I'd have to bring it up to 40" is to use double lines and fill the areas between them with different colored fabric from the main background to give it a stained glass effect. Definitely something worth looking into. ;o)

Sometimes you just don't know ...

how things will turn out. lol Take the picture above for example. This is how I start my Celtic doodles - set up a frame and then add "stop" lines. At this point I have no idea where the design is going.

Here I fill in my turn points, but it still doesn't give me too many clues.

And I keep going till the design is filled. Sometimes (with this many lines) I can't tell if a design consists of one uninterrupted line of if there is the possibility of a multi color application.

Once I follow the line with a highlighter I can tell at once - one color application. To see how the design would look like without the background grid and stop lines I trace it on an overhead projector sheet. The design has symmetry on the diagonal and as I said above, you don't know what you get till it's done - this design isn't my favorite, but it was good practice.

Here is another example of an unexpected outcome, but I like this one. :o)

And below is a design, I am planing on turning into a wall hanging in the near future.

Then I was also playing around with some practice pieces with rectangular grids. Can you envision the top one as a table runner?

OK, now back to some applique!

I got to work a little more on the table runner last night and the picture shows how much I've gotten done so far. Plan is to have all of the applique finished this weekend, because I have quite a few other projects waiting for me to work on.

Celtic knotwork class project

This picture was taken at an earlier stage of the knotwork. I'm almost done with all of the applique and I really like how it's coming along. I made one change to the instructions - I'll be using two different fabrics, instead of a one color application, but other than that the design will be the same.
I've met Nancy Chong (who is teaching this class) in person, while we were still living in Washington state, but living in AZ now, it's nice to take classes from her long distance at Quilt University. Her classes there are great, because her material is very detailed and you work at your own pace, while still having the benefit of classroom discussion/input.

I don't know if I'll finish the applique over the weekend (DD is having little guest over), but if I do, I'll take a picture of the finished top to post here.

Sewing machine caddy-mat

This is a sewing machine mat I made as a gift, using 3 Fat Quarters. The nice thing about these mats is that you can put some supplies you need, while using your sewing machine, right in front of you in the pockets and it seems to muffle the sound of your machine a bit.
I wrote up instructions, as I went through the steps of making this mat, and I'm thinking of possibly teaching this as a class. What do you think?

Celtic Knotwork doodles

After having signed up with Nancy Chong's Celtic knotwork class at Quilt University, I've ordered a few books, how to "draw your own Celtic designs". Last evening I started experimenting with some practice designs of my own and I wanted to share the process with you.

Here I'm working with a 7x7 block grid. The red marks tell me where the grid will be interrupted and the light pencil markings are the beginning of the knotwork. (You'll see an oops in the picture here, where I didn't highlight one of my "stop marks")In the next pictures you see how I'm working my way out of the center.With some lines I stop to take a moment to see where the lines will lead me.And then I can continue to close the lines. By now this looks pretty confusing, don't you think? To make the visualization easier on me I decided to use different color highlighters. Later on, if I decide to turn this into an actual project I can use different colors of fabric in place of the different colors of highlighter that I used, or make the design all in one color, but I think different colors make the projects more interesting.Here you see more clearly that some parts of the design are continuous and others (although continuous in themselves) are not continuous throughout the entire design.

Now it's time to fill some of the empty spaces, shown with the orange highlighter - and you probably can see that something's still missing.So to balance the design out, I mirror image the orange line and fill the rest of the design in with the yellow highlighter.

Voila! This is the finished design doodle. I think this design, once worked out in a larger scale would make a nice table topper or wallhanging. Maybe you'll see this as a finished project in the future on my blog. ;o)