Fabric and scissors

I’m playing around with trapunto as I have a quilt to make after our quilt show in November.  My friend Major has embroidered blocks from some time ago that she asked me to make a quilt for her from.  After seeing the blocks I decided that trapunto is the way to go to really make the embroidery stand out.  While I was in Maine neen let me borrow her trapunto scissors to cut away batting.  When I got home I started looking and looking and looking to find these scissors by Dovo.  After a bit I realized that these scissors are sold by Dovo as “nose hair trimmers” and that I could probably get a decent pair at a local pharmacy.

I picked these up yesterday.  They’re a bit longer than the ones neen has, made in Italy, will be sharpened for free and about 1/2 the cost.  I’m looking forward to trying them out very soon.

In an effort to really get the hang of trapunto I put two techniques together over the last couple of days.  Trapunto and fabric card making.  Ricky Tims showed how to make fabric cards one day on an episode of The Quilt Show, I’ve used this method once before for a birthday card and it’s so much fun.  I wrote a message, cut away the excess batting, quilted the daylights out of it and here’s what I came up with:

This took a few hours but it was so much fun I decided to play again and came up with this for my sister.  I had a bit of trouble with neens “Thank You” quilt.  I chose red backing from a left over piece from years and years ago that I’d washed before using it at the time.  The red ran.  Thankfully I noticed this as the red started bleeding out, picked the quilt up out of the  water and just let water run through it.

My sisters quilt doesn’t use trapunto I just wanted to play with some quilting.

I promised photos of the fabric I purchased in Maine… here is all of it.

I woke up thinking of a quilt to make with this black & white & gray, black & white gray & red fabric.  I’m hoping I can pull off my vision the way I want to.  It’s going to be a bit of a challenge but worth it I think down the road.

The other fabrics are for tote bags or quilts.  I really like the chrysanthemum fabric and I seem to have a dot theme going on here…hmmn, that’s food for thought isn’t it!

Happy Quilting!

Teri