Carli The Quilter

I choose fabrics which are often not a solid color. Alternately, I rarely choose cotton fabrics. Rarely, do a use a color theme or try to keep my fabric color choices in a set pallet. As you can see I choose wild choices! Let me explain, I see blends, texture and tone all at once. I love the different shapes and lines of this photo. And I celebrate like this happy buda! Such as this shock of expression in this rayon fabric from my various bags of stash materials that make me drool every time I see it. I am always organized and ready to be portable. So I'm super busy on commissions right now and can't share much of it as I always keep the full on shots for after the commission has been delivered and loved. In this case, the mad picking of stitches is not going to go live on this blog until after the 12 of April. So yes, Peg, I'll be posting the full post after the Easter sometime. But as usual, I'l...

I encourage anyone to have a photo transfer done for an upcoming quilt, Its so easy and I prefer to use a professional embroidery company or sometimes, its a dry cleaner or others. Photo transfers when done properly by a reputable company is a great way to share photos in a quilt. But if the company doesn't use inks that are NOT water soluble, then they will run into your quilt. So when I get up north again, I'll be going back to this company who has cost me 17 hrs of unpicking on a commission project. I'm breathing a sigh of relief after the nasty offending playing cards that are made from regular ink and water soluble OUT of my flimsey. I'm recreating a poker table including cards, chips and Royal Flush, I discovered the offending ink well into this quilt. And so the rule of the day, check your photo transfers for water solubility. I'm really enjoying the Rail Fence Blocks that Sujata Shah has written about in her new book "Cultural F...

I just found this blogger Hibiscus Stitches and was poking around with her pages and I found this page of surprises. This blogger has a bundle of really cute patterns from single patterns to a book as well. I have found this great pattern in the Quilts magazine Jan/Feb 2015. You must check it out. Click on the link below. Enjoy, Carli http://hibiscus-stitches.blogspot.ca/p/items-for-sale.html?m=1

When doing photo transfers, I usually have no issues and even years later the transferred photos are beautiful. At first, my anxiety was huge, worrying how the heck I'd ever make it look like the new quality it started with, but thankfully, my son talked me down to a normal level of anxiety. You know just the kind of anxiety felt when you're in the middle of big project and something goes wrong. So this is the problem. In this photo below, the red color from previously sewn on playing cards ran into the white fabric from several drops of water. Its shaded and looks worse than it is in this photo, but the local photo transfer business was not at fault, it was the company I used in Smithers that had obviously forgotten that my playing cards transfer MUST be properly water proof and of an excellent quality for my commission. I have my work cut out for me now! I've been slowly but surely hand extracting the tiny stitches around each one of the playing car...