I am doing a swap with my neighbor, Laurie, from "Indulge your Shelf" blogging fame. She is involved with a group that is doing a Valentine's inchie swap and she invited me to participate. The swap involves making 3-inch fabric embellished blocks in a Valentine theme. Since there are 8 swappers, I have to make 7 blocks for trade and one that I'll make for myself to keep the block numbers such that I'll be able to make a finished project more easily. The blocks I receive won't necessarily be crazy quilted, but since that's what I do...
On these blocks I tried a new technique of printing on ribbons that I learned from a book called
Fabric Embellishing, The Basics and Beyond by Ruth Chandler, Lis Kettle, Heather Thomas, and Lauren Vlcek. The book is rich with ideas for embellishing with great instructions, and practically, it is spiral bound. This ribbon may not be the best example of the technique because there is not enough contrast between the ribbon and the words. You will see better examples in the remaining seven blocks. I can see a tremendous application of these ribbons for my memory quilt.
Will you look at this beautiful work of art?! Annamaria from Romania made it for me in my color choices. I LOVE it! Now I must run off and finish hers! You can see more pictures of it on her blog: http://manya72.blogspot.com/ Take some time to look at some of her other blog posts.
Yesterday Shari came over to work on the pillow swap with me. We spent too much time (me showing her stuff) and got very little sewing in. Then she made me go shopping for jewelry pieces. grin. Ok - I took her to see a friend of mine who collects and sells jewelry pieces. At any rate, getting back to the story at hand, she brought me this wonderful crazy quilted bag she made for me in the Stitchmap Moderator Swap!!!!!! I am thrilled. It is an awesome bag - lined with a zipper and there are so many wonderful CQ motifs and stitching on it that it took a while to digest it all. Thanks Shari! I love it.
This one is so cute. It came with a story of a woman who wrote a letter to her betrothed who had promised to return for her after leaving to make his fortune. It has a little pocket where her picture fits in and behind the picture is a postage stamp that belonged to the maker's grandfather-in-law. Cute, cute!
This is one of the little 3-inch valentines that I received back for my valentine's crazy quilt blocks. Isn't it cute! The heart consists of weaved ribbons - something I definitely plan to try on a crazy quilt one of these days.
