Friday, September 16, 2016

Silk Star

 After I made the Lonestar sampler, I decided to use some of my silk tie fabric to see how it would look in a lonestar pattern.  I added splashes of leftover kimono fabric here and there for color.
 I did not foundation piece it.  I did not back the silk with interfacing.  I wanted to see how piecing the silk would look like.  Okay but not okay.  The silk was flimsy and after sewing it, I would have to check and recheck the pattern.  Lonestar is not a forgiving pattern. 
 The points don't match, the lines are not straight. 
Visually it looks striking.  The feel of the silk is also very nice.  This quilt was given to Lily.

Tara Faughnan

 Tara Faughnan is a modern quilter who lives in the local Bay Area.  She taught a Color workshop at the end of august at Sue Fox's Dream Studio in Berkeley.  She asked us to bring 20-30 five inch strips of solid fabrics.  I should know by now that to get the best results, you need to follow the instructions on the supply list. I did not want to buy more fabric and decided to use my collection of fossil fern fat quarters.  They read as a solid from a distance.
 She started off the class by asking us to choose fabrics that make us feel happy, icky and unhappy.  A lot of this was using your intuition.  How you liked the way two fabrics looked together.  My first choice was a happy fuschia pink and bright yellow, because to me they represent happy fabrics.  They are happy separately, but not so happy together.  too bright.  Then we went on to choosing, complementary, analogous, monochromatic, high contrast, low contrast...  Starting from the top left trough the first 3 rows, are the fabric choices I used for this study.
This is a detail of the quilting.  I used a Hawaiian print of heliconia flowers on the back fabric.  I outlined stitched the flowers and used metallic thread in the bobbin, so it would show on the front.  Tara had a great idea on her class quilt.  She machine quilted straight lines from the top to the bottom and interspersed it with hand quilting.  It looked wonderful.