Crazy Quilt Purple Sachet Pillow Received from Terry

This is a gorgeous little sachet/pillow that Terry has made for me. It has a beautiful bird on the right, my initial "P" in the middle and a lovely fan at the bottom left and lots of other little surprises that we always find on crazy quilt projects.

Pierrette =^..^=

Embroidered Fan on Crazy Quilt Block

On this Round Robin block I embroidered this little fan, adding some silk ribbon flowers and leaves and a little ribbon at the bottom.

Pierrette =^..^=

Woman's Hat & Button Seam Treatment on a Crazy Quilt Block

On another Crazy Quilt Round Robin block, I made this woman's hat with flowers and beads and also the button seam treatment, which I thought would look pretty with it.

Pierrette =^..^=

Tree on a Crazy Quilt Block

Since I was a child I have always had this passion for trees. I remember making drawings of trees with a simple HB pencil and spending hours enjoying myself doing so, which made me think that it might be a lot of fun to try stitching a tree on this Round Robin block and it was :-)

Pierrette =^..^=

Crazy Quilt Heart

This is a little crazy quilt heart experiment that I did using a cigarette silk print lady, stitching a bird house with some climbing roses, a bird, spider web, seam treatments, putting a little lace with pearls, adding a few buttons and golden dragonlady, spider and bird.

Pierrette =^..^=

Crazy Quilt Pillow: Gift from Terry

This is the first crazy quilt pillow that Terry made for me. She used the brown background so that it would work well with the colors in my living room and also because I love warm colors. What I love about crazy quilt (something that I am not very good at making myself, I am afraid) is the fact that you can look at this pillow for example and always see something that you had not quite seen before.

Terry seems to be a natural when it comes to stitching stuff like that and I just love this pillow.

If you would like to see more of Terry's work, she has her own blog at http://through-the-hoop.blogspot.com/

Pierrette =^..^=

Memory Pillow Crazy Quilt Style given to me by my best friend Terry

Terry wanted to make something that would have special meaning for me so she thought of making a "Memory Pillow" crazy quilt style. She asked me for some black and white photos that had lots of meaning to both my husband and myself, so I sent her a bunch of them by email. She chose 7 amongst them, which we particularly love. She then proceeded to embellish the pillow crazy quilt style, stitched a beautiful lace all around it and sent to me.

I absolutely adore that pillow and what makes it so dear to me is the fact that most of the people we hold dear in our lives are now gone, but certainly not forgotten. With this very thoughtful gift that Terry has made for me, now I can look at these photos and remember how it used to be.

Many thanks to you, Terry, for thinking of this and creating something this special for us :-)

Pierrette =^..^=

Crazy Quilt Needlecase

While I was part of a crazy quilt group I made this needlecase. It was a design by Peggy White of New Zealand.


The project was originally made for a little purse, but since I felt that I would probably never use it, I decided to finish it as a needlecase instead. It is bigger than my other needlecases so I can store lots and lots of needles in it.


Here is a link to her website where you can see the little purse in question: http://www.kalikokottage.com/cgi-bin/kaliko/kal.pl?section=projects


Pierrette =^..^=

My adventures with Crazy Quilting (3)

Today I have stitched a little reindeer face on my block, reminding us that Santa will soon be coming with all his wonderful gifts :-)

A Closer look at the little reindeer face.

I have first seen it in my "A ~ Z of Bullions" book and I remember thinking at the time that it was pretty cute. It is made with regular DMC threads. The antlers are bullions knots, eyes and nose are French knots.

Pierrette =^..^=

http://community.webshots.com/user/sunshineplus

My adventures with Crazy Quilting (2)

After digging in my Christmas decorations, I found this cute little police boy with a big sign saying "No Snooping before Dec. 25th" and I knew right then and there that I had found my special piece for my block. This little sweetheart must be over 50 years old, at least. I inherited it from my parents.

I made another seam, the one on the upper left of my block. This stitch is called "Threaded Running Stitch" and can be seen here on Sharon's web site: http://inaminuteago.com/stitchdict/stitch/running-threaded.html .

I thought that writing the word "Noël" with yellow silk thread would look good at this particular place so I opened up my MSWords and tried different fonts until I found one that I liked and used it on my block.

A closer view of this cute little police boy. What a find I made. I still can't believe my luck :-)

Pierrette =^..^=

http://community.webshots.com/user/sunshineplus

My adventures with Crazy Quilting (1)

One of the thing that I personally find the most difficult to do is Crazy Quilting. It seems easy enough when I look at it, but for me creating a block well put together that just seems to flow is actually quite a challenge, to say the least.

In the past, I have tried to do a little crazy quiltinig (see photos in my Webshots photo album of my valiant efforts :-) http://home-and-garden.webshots.com/album/371378901JSZjCv so when I saw an online class about crazy quilting on the Joggles site http://www.joggles.com/store/catalog/index.php?cPath=75_450&osCsid=62ebc8edc8a505d9b46f49d17f7f288d I decided to take the plunge. This class is called "Encrusted Crazy Quilting with Sharon B". Sharon's site is http://www.inaminuteago.com/

The first challenge was to find the fabric, so here I was going through boxes of fabric and scraps in order to find some fabric that talked to me. I wanted to do a Christmas theme since I always like to do projects according to the period of the year I am in.

Then came my second challenge when I tried to piece my block together using the flip and sew method, starting with a five sided piece in the middle, but that did not worked out too well for me, so scrapped that block and decided to use one of those blocks already drawn for you that I found in the book called "101 Crazy Quilt Blocks" by Linda Causee. I flipped pages until I found one that appealed to me and used it to piece my block.

Something I forgot to mention when I was trying to put that first block together. I had put my five sided piece a little off center on my foundation, just like Sharon said, followed with other pieces around that central piece, going clockwise. My block was about 1/3 pieced when I turned around to look at something on my computer. By then I could see lots of white foundation fabric and some Christmas fabric and when I turned back towards my block, you can't imagine what I saw. There was one black spider, exactly like the ones we like to stitch on crazy blocks and "she" (imagining she was female) was sitting on the white foundation part of my block, so she was quite visible.

I hate real spiders, so shouted to my husband who was in the other room to come real quick and get rid of "it", so here comes my husband and I explained to him "not too calmly" that there was a spider on my block and to please remove it for me. He looked at it, bended closer over it and was not doing anything but looking at it. I said to him "Would you remove this spider" and he looked at me and said "Is that something that you have embroidered?" I said "NO" "It is a REAL one!" By the time he had finally reached the conclusion that this was a REAL spider, she was gone and he had to hunt her down under lots of fabric. At one point, not sure how but she felt on the floor and he put his foot over and that was the end of that. After he had left my room, I had mixed feelings about his behavior. On one hand, I was not too happy with him that it took him that long to react and on the other hand thinking to myself "My embroidery must be very good that when this man sees a real spider, he wonders if I have stitched it or not".

The third challenge was to put some lace and braid on my block. I went through all that I had that could possibly work and found a few pieces that I liked. I then tried each piece on each seam until that it seems to me that each selected piece could only go to that particular seam.

The fourth challenge was to start finding interesting seam treatments, which for me is much easier said then done. So far, I have made two.

The first seam is over a piece of red shiny rick-rack. I stitched some zig zag chain stitch over it in green and then added some detached chain stitches in red on each side.

The second seam consists of first stitching a curve line and then adding some red roses inside each curve made with bullions and adding some detached chain stitches to make the leaves.

After all this work, I took one day off to clear my brain as I have been spending so much time online looking at blocks and in books researching what might be interesting to add on my Christmas block that I found myself on information overload and needed time to process all this.

I am still at the information gathering stage and will soon be restarting stitching again on my block, hopefully with a clearer vision of what I would like to further add.

Pierrette =^..^=

http://community.webshots.com/user/sunshineplus