TAST Week 7 & 8

I will be out of town most of the week so I decided I better add the fly stitch to my block before I left. I had trouble getting the fly stitch even. Other than that I like it but I want to practice it a lot more. The feather stitch is right above it. That one was a little harder for me to get going on. It took several practice rows before I realized that if I just made use of those "imaginary lines" I kept reading about that it is a really simple stitch. I am starting a new CQ block next week for a class and I am going to do a lot more with the feather and fly stitch. I will probably go back and add something to the feather stitch on this block.

Best Friend

This is my February page for the Fabric in Altered Arts fabric page swap. I saw a quilt on Simply Quilts that was made up of blocks with a simple background and heart applique. On that quilt the background and the heart were a real mix of colors and themes. Very cool quilt. I wanted to do something similar and remembered my cute valentine dog fabric. The print on my fabric was so large that it was hard to get a whole dog and the text surrounding it into the size heart that I needed which was only about 5". The pages are only 6x6 so I just had to do the best I could. I had tried a different fabric (also dogs...lol) and had the same problem. I cut out the heart freehand and used a blanket stitch, raw edges, no turning. Need to learn how to do that. I added a few words using my machine and then filled in the blank spots with some decorative stitching. I realized about half way through the project that someone else in the group had also used a dog for her Valentine/February page. We are a bunch of dog lovers in that group! You can find my 2 doxies in the January archives.

TAST Week 6

I added a row of Eyelet stitches with a French Knot in the center and Cretan stitches to my CQ block this week. I had planned to add French Knots between the stitches as well but they were just too close together. They were both worked with perle cotton. I am really looking forward to adding the Feather stitch to this block. I am taking an online crazy quilt block class for the next several weeks so a lot more stitching to be done!

Flapper

This is a page I did in a fabric book with a Flappers theme. I just realized that I only scanned the back of the page. The black and green fabric was provided with the book. I have some old french postcards that I used for my flappers. I ink jet image is stitched to a piece of silk and then stitched to the fabric. I added the rose applique and feather along with the pink bead trim on the outside edge of the page but still need something else. I have until tomorrow to figure it out.

TAST Week 5

These are my samples of the Chevron stitch for TAST, week 5 already. I have already taken one of Sharon's classes but am now convinced that I need to sign up for the Personal Library of Stitches. The more I do the more I like what I am doing. I had a little trouble with the mechanics of this stitch in the beginning but once I got going I really enjoyed it. I started out with the Aida cloth using Watercolours by Caron and a DMC thread. The bottom row is Anchor Metallic Pearl Cotton. And it was on clearance and my favorite metallic thread so far so I guess I better get some more before they run out. The crazy quilt square, which is my first also has the Chevron stitch with the same threads. I need to go back and add the second row of stitching on the CQ block like I did on the bottom row of the Aida cloth. I had some fabric that I really wanted to use for a crazy quilt block and did not realize that I just had too much in the way of prints and not enough in the way of solids. I will have to use some bright colors in my threads to make them stand out. I will continue with this block for several more stitches. The next one will have more solid colors.