I am a quilt designer/teacher/author, a wife/mother/grandmother, and certified yoga instructor who is searching for balance, strength, and happiness in all things.
I don’t need to write anything. Instead I will share this chart and this link to a really great article about the woman, Leatrice Eiseman, who has chosen the color of the year for Pantone since the beginning.
It’s fun to look back at all the colors…
Playing with color for your job sounds lovely. However, naming colors sounds like real work to me. Congrats to her for doing both jobs well!
Lorna has been making sequin ball ornaments using the Sequin Ball Kit at pieceocake.com and she wanted to share the story. Here’s Lorna…
I had an idea to use wool like Becky did (video at bottom), but vertically, and it was honestly easier than I thought it would be. I cut 1/2″ wool strips about 4-1/2″ long (you can always trim, so don’t stress) with a rotary cutter and I set up my work space.
Somewhere in the middle of making the ball, I realized that I forgot to poke a hole through the center of the ball for the wire. I’m going to add that later, after I find a skewer to poke through.
I started with the blue strips. The foam balls have a little mark on the top and the bottom, and a faint line around the middle, again making this easy. I loaded my pin with the bead and sequin, used the tip of the pin to put a little glue at the top (or bottom) of the ball, added the wool on the glue, dipped the tip of the pin in the glue again and then stuck it through the wool into the ball to secure it. Then I did the same at the bottom (or top), and here is where you can trim if your wool strip is too long.
Then it was just the regular process of loading the pin with the bead and the sequin and the glue, but through the wool into the ball. I did the same with the other two blue wool strips.
I trimmed the pink wool strips so they would kind of fit in, and did the same process with those three. At that point I had created 6 small empty sections and I sorted out pink and blue sequins into my trays. Then it was just the normal process as described in the video.
I haven’t filled in the blue wedges yet, but the pink are done. Overnight, I put my bead tray with glue into a plastic sandwich baggy to keep the glue from drying, and it worked just fine.
I liked the 1/4″ strips with the little stars, and if I had it to do again, I’d play more with the wool. In fact, I’m already thinking about what my next ball will be like. It might be a rainbow! We talk about wool applique being fast, but wool makes this super fast, too. The more wool you use, the faster it goes. And it’s pretty!
If you don’t already have wool scraps, Tracy Trevethan Wool is the best, quality and color selection, IMO (in my opinion).
The random number generator chose Lynn J. from Wisconsin and she will receive the nice grouping of small items that are mostly from Moda. This week we gave away 2 small notebooks, some acrylic templates, a sewing charm bracelet and (not from Moda) a bag of wooden owl buttons!
I’ll be back with another Giveaway next Wednesday. Until then you can shop for all sorts of sewing notions, books, and other fun stuff at pieceocake.com!
I bought the pattern shortly after it came out and then set it aside. When we were having some remodeling done in 2013 and I was relegated to the upstairs, I decided to unearth the pattern and fabric I’d picked out earlier and started to sew. I made the signature block first (next time I’ll make it last), and worked on the baskets every single day while the crew was downstairs sawing, pounding and painting. It kept me sane. I’d been doing needle turn appliqué for a long time, but this is the first project that I made using laminated templates and vinyl overlays. I loved it!
I worked on Fresh Picked Posies long after the remodeling was done, in-between other projects and it was my pick up and go retreat project, which was great because I didn’t have to pack a sewing machine. I finally finished the top, had it quilted and showed the quilt last spring in the Quilter’s Anonymous quilt show in Seattle. That show got me connected with the Garden of Quilts people in Lehi UT, who invited me to teach. I taught… and Fresh Picked Posies, along with 3 of my other quilts, was hung in the Garden of Quilts show at Ashton Botanical Gardens.
Sue Lynch wrote to say “Love your designs so I will share my wonderful whimsical garden with you!” Thank you, Sue, for sharing your lovely quilt. The brown backgrounds always remind me of chocolate and who doesn’t love chocolate!
This is Susan Buscher’s Whimsical quilt, appliqued in wool. Isn’t it wonderful! She shared it during Show and Tell at the Out on a Limb quilt guild in Jasper, GA last week and let me take a photo. Thank you, Susan, for sharing your quilt with us!
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