Every time I look at this piece of dupioni I see a dancer, depending on the distance sometimes there are two. Human imagination allows us to look at what is there, see something vastly different that what is intended, and develop our sense of play. This piece started with the feather motif in the middle, stitched out in Superior Twist. There is a certain style of feather that was eluding me, so this started life as a practice piece, and eventually became a clutch.
When exploring new quilt motifs using different weights, and types will help us develop a sense of what something will look like with whatever it is we want to use. This exploration adds to our library of knowledge in a way that develops our understanding of how things work. The more we allow ourselves to explore what this fabric, thread, batting, machine, needles will do, our quilting will become more consistent. We will be okay with the character of our quilts, and essentially the character of who we are as quilt makers.
I’m going to pause our normally scheduled blog and share this link to a CBS Sunday Morning website. Melanie Testa, and several other women share their breast cancer stories, the story of mastectomies, and opting to remain flat, unreconstructed after.
Cancer touches so many lives in so many ways.
Each person unique in how they deal with it. My uncle fought as long as he could, my dad gave over to it; Melanie chose to remain flat, Jake will have reconstructive surgery later.
And now back to our regularly scheduled program:
While quilting Tilde I had an epiphany: cotton thread is grabby. I had cotton thread in the bobbin, was stitching with metallic thread on the top. The tension problems were not resolving no matter what I did, so I changed the bobbin thread to polyester, readjusted the tension and voila! no more tension problems. The grabby nature of the cotton was pulling the metallic thread to the back.
This wee bit of knowledge was added to the classes as lots of us want to use and struggle with. Knowing that using polyester in the bobbin solves the tension issue is priceless. I generally use a non-cotton batting.
I’m certainly a quilty character. #charactercounts
Happy Quilting!
Teri
