Download Spinning Star Templates here.

Spinning Star ~ Appliquéd Coasters

To prepare the Spinning Star appliqué:

• Trace the double-line Spinning Star onto the paper side of fusible web
• Iron onto wrong side of appliqué fabric
• Cut out on traced lines

To prepare the round coaster:

• Trace the inner 4″ circle onto the paper side of fusible web
• Iron the 4″ circle onto the wrong side of background fabric
• Cut out on traced lines
• Trace two outer 4 1/4″ circles onto the paper side of fusible web
• Iron the 4 1/4″ circles onto the wrong side of fabric used for appliqué
• Cut out on traced lines

To assemble the coaster:

• Peel off the paper backing from one 4 1/4″ circle
• Fuse the two 4 1/4″ circles, wrong sides together, leaving one layer of paper between to add stiffness
• Peel off the paper backing from the 4″ circle
• Center the 4″ circle on the 4 1/4″ circle and fuse in place
• Center the Spinning Star on the 4″ circle and fuse in place (image will be reversed)
• Fuse a layer of Heat’n Bond Vinyl to top or both sides, following manufacturer’s directions

Spinning Star ~ Quilted Star

Using a water-soluble fabric marker:

• Mark quilt top with double-line Spinning Star or single-line, as desired
• Also mark the straight-line five-pointed star, if desired

For trapunto, using the double-line Spinning Star motif:

• Layer quilt top with a layer of high-loft batting, such as wool or polyester, and baste
• Using water-soluble thread in the needle and cotton thread in the bobbin, machine stitch the Spinning Star
• Trim the batting close to the machine stitching
• Layer the quilt top with batting and backing, and baste
• Using matching or contrasting thread, machine stitch the Spinning Star and the five-pointed star
• Fill the area inside the five-pointed star and around the Spinning Star with tight stippling
• Add other quilting, as desired
• Rinse completed quilt in water to dissolve the water-soluble thread and remove markings, block, and lay flat to dry

Spinning Star ~ Beaded Ornament

To bead the Spinning Star motif:

• Trace the single-line Spinning Star onto the right side of ornament fabric
• If desired, add a layer of batting and machine stitch on the traced line
• Using either the traced line or the machine-stitched line, hand sew seed beads along the Spinning Star, back-stitching every three or four beads to secure

To assemble the five-pointed star ornament:

• Make a template of the five-pointed star
• Use the template to cut out the beaded front, adding a 1/4-inch seam allowance
• Use the template to cut out another star for the back of the ornament, again adding a 1/4-inch seam allowance
• With right sides together, sew the front and back together leaving an opening between an inside and outside point
• Clip curves and trim seam allowance, then turn five-pointed star right side out
• Use a crochet hook or other dull-tipped instrument to push out star points
• Slip stitch opening closed
• Add a bugle and seed bead to four of the star points
• To create a hanging loop on the fifth star point, string a length of seed beads and fasten securely through the first bead on the string

Photography from Thibeault's Table, www.thibeaultstable.com

Tourtière

Ingredients:
pastry for double-crust pie
1 lb. ground pork
1/2 cup water
1 onion, finely chopped
2 potatoes, cooked and mashed
1/4 – 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 – 1/2 tsp. clove
1 tsp. salt, pepper, garlic

Directions:

1. In a frying pan, cook ground pork, water and onion for 25 minutes.  Drain some of the liquid.
2. In a mixing bowl, add mashed potatoes and seasonings to the cooked pork mixture and mix well.
3. Place mixture in an uncooked pie shell.
4. Add pastry to top of pie.  Trim and flute edges as desired.
5. Bake at 400° for 20 – 25 minutes.

Serve with Garden Relish, Garden Salad Red Chow, or Salsa.  To freeze, cool completely after cooking.  Thaw and reheat before serving.

In 2009, my quilt Instruments of Praise won first prize for Innovative Appliqué at the IQA judged show Quilts: A World of Beauty.  It seemed fitting that my first entry into the silent auction should somehow represent this quilt.  So, last year I created the mini-quilt Trumpets of Praise.  It is a reproduction of one of the four blocks in the original quilt – the trumpet block – and measures 24″ x 24″.  The quilt sold for $225 and helped raise a total of $15,495 for the IQA.

This year, my new quilt Flourish on the Vine has been accepted as a finalist into the 2011 IQA judged show Quilts: A World of Beauty.  Once again, I wanted my entry into the silent auction to represent the larger show quilt but this time I didn’t have convenient blocks to choose from!  I decided to reproduce the center motif of the quilt – with a few modifications.

Flourish Within measures 13-½” x 13-½”.  Like the original, it is hand appliquéd; machine quilted with trapunto vines and quarter-inch gridwork; and finished with a half-inch clamshell decorative edge.  I even used the same backing fabric.

Support the International Quilt Association and place your bid at the Celebrity Mini Quilt Silent Auction this November.  You could own a piece of the quilt Flourish on the Vine!

Those who were following along:  saw the focus fabric that was used as a color scheme for choosing fabrics; watched the center panel develop, section by section; learned of the challenges I faced while designing fruit-filled swags for the borders and how they were overcome; observed other appliqué motifs that were added to the borders; and glimpsed some of the quilting designs as I discussed my thread selection.  What has not been revealed is the completed quilt – until now.

But before we get to that, here are some other details about the quilt Flourish on the Vine.

Striped Borders
The center motif is framed with half-inch wide green fabric flanked by strips of a quarter-inch wide gold-on-gold stripe.  This outline suggested the borders that should be used to surround the appliquéd sections.  As the scale increased, so did the width of the green stripe.  The border measures 1-¼” with a ¾” green stripe around the center panel and 1-½” wide with a 1″ green stripe around the outer edges.

Edge Finish
When I saw the effect of quilting half-inch clam shells around the striped borders, I wondered how I could echo that around the outside edges.  Could I possibly make half-inch clam shells out of fabric?  Sewing them was easy; cutting and trimming them was tedious; turning them right side out was tricky; positioning them evenly around the quilt required some ingenuity.  But I’m so glad I did it!  I’ll tell you more about how the clam shells were made in a future article.

The Name
Some quilt names are obvious, like The Lord is my Shepherd for a quilt depicting the 23rd Psalm.  And while I am the Vine or The Vine were possibilities, I kept looking for something that said a little more.  One day, the word “flourish” came to mind.  As a verb, flourish means to grow or prosper – to “bear much fruit” as it says in John 15:5.  As a noun however, a flourish is a curlicue, a spiral, a decoration – the quilt is covered with those!  The word was perfect; the challenge was to use it in such a way that it could read as a noun and a verb.  Hence, Flourish on the Vine.

I am the vine; you are the branches.
If you remain in Me and I in you,
you will bear much fruit;
apart from Me you can do nothing.

This first wreath is a celtic knot design, made from appliquéd bias strips.  Believe it or not, the background of the quilt is filled with hand-quilted stippling.  I’ve never done that again!

This wreath is formed from small paper-pieced blocks.  I added some machine embroidery and sewed it into a cushion.

I found the design for this grapevine wreath in one of the Best of Baltimore Beauties books by Elly Sienkiewicz.  But instead of making the block using traditional appliqué, I colored it with crayons!  Yep, regular Crayola crayons.  When crayon is heat set, the wax melts right into the fabric.  Just remember to iron from the wrong side and protect your ironing board cover.  Machine embroidery outlines each motif and adds definition.

I really liked that grapevine wreath, which generated a little series.  What other techniques could I use – other than traditional appliqué – to interpret this block?  I tried broderie perse.  I found fabric that had grapes on it, cut them out, and arranged them into a wreath.  The motifs were fused and the edges finished with a machine blanket stitch.

Then I tried a three-dimensional appliqué technique.  I sandwiched a layer of fusible adhesive between two layers of fabric, cut out my motifs, and molded them into shape while they were still warm.  The motifs were then tacked onto the quilt.

Finally, I made a grapevine wreath using snippets or confetti.  Small pieces of fabric were cut out, arranged like a mosaic, and fused in place.  Fun!

This holly wreath is also three-dimensional.  This time, I stitched two fabrics right sides together, slit the back, and turned the holly leaves right side out.  The leaves were then tacked onto the already-quilted quilt.  Gold metallic thread was used for the veins; other embellishments include gold seed beads, buttons, and a wire ribbon bow.

This poinsettia wreath was made with a soft-edge piecing technique.  Actual motifs from the fabric were cut out and appliquéd around the inner and outer edges.  This softens the edges and creates a circular appearance.

Here is another example, using a floral fabric and a smaller patch size.

So do you think I like wreath quilts at all?!  It is no wonder that I became so fascinated with papercut appliqué.

If you haven’t been following the progress of this quilt, you can read the previous articles under the category “Flourish on the Vine”.   But if you have been following along, you may recall some of the challenges that I faced while designing the borders.  One dilemma was finding a way to balance the appliquéd swags in a rectangular quilt design.  Placing two swags along the vertical borders left a space that would have to be filled with something.

Here is that something.  I inserted an underlay of green fabric between the pairs of gold vines in order to add a bit more visual weight.  The fabrics and the shapes are very similar to those in the center panel, which I felt would help unify the borders with the rest of the quilt.

The swags on the horizontal borders almost touch, so a much simpler motif was needed there.  If you look closely, you will see that the horizontal motif is basically a subset of the vertical motif.  Why recreate the wheel?

I’ve had a bit of fun adding up the number of patches in this quilt.  At last count, there were 665 individual patches stitched onto the center panel.  Each swag contains 160 and there are eight swags.  Wow, that’s 1280 patches!  Add to that 10 x 2 for the horizontal motifs and 40 x 2 for the vertical motifs, and there’s another hundred.  That brings the total to 2,045 patches – but there are more to come.  Stay tuned for the corner motifs!

There are many ways to go about tracing from a photograph, but I would like to show you how EQ7 – the popular quilt design software from The Electric Quilt Company – can help.

Let’s start with this picture of a daylily.  It can be found in the EQ7 photo library.

EQ7 has a feature that allows us to change the color depth in a photo.  Color depth is expressed in bits per pixel.  The more bits per pixel, the more colors that can be displayed.  This photo, at 24 bits per pixel, can represent 16,777,216 different colors!  But if we reduced the color depth to 4 bits per pixel, only 16 different colours would be displayed.  This would certainly make the photograph much easier to trace.

From the Image worktable in EQ7, choose “Increase/Decrease Color Depth…” from the IMAGE menu.  Decrease the bits per pixel to 4 and click OK.  The daylily photo now looks like this.  Can you see how much easier it would be to trace each individual shade of color in this altered photograph?

We can trace using EQ7 as well.  Save the altered daylily photo to your Sketchbook and then edit on the Block worktable.  It will appear on the “Tracing Image” tab, where you can adjust how light or dark you would like it to be.

Begin by tracing all the elements of one color that appear furthest away in the photo – in this case, the bright red flower petals.  Notice how three of the petals appear to overlap the other three.  Tracing the underneath petals first makes the process easier.

Here are the six flower petals colored.  Can you see now the importance of overlapping the petals in the correct order?

What’s next?  I would say the second darker shade of red.

Here is the colored version.

Continue tracing one color at a time, working from back to front, until the entire photo has been traced.

Here’s how it could look in a quilt!

EQ7 can also help with constructing your pictorial quilt.  Print the block as an appliqué pattern to any size, tiling over multiple pages if necessary.

You can also print templates for each patch.

Not comfortable with drawing on your computer?  It does take a little practice – and a graphics tablet doesn’t hurt either!  You can still use EQ7 to help you design your pictorial quilt.  Just print the photo after reducing the color depth and trace it by hand.

First, I needed to figure out sizes:  the length and width of each swag; how many swags would fit in each border; and the length and width of the borders.  To do this, I used EQ6 (EQ7 wasn’t out yet).  The quilt hadn’t been designed using EQ software, but I believed I could use the quilt layout worktable to help me visualize the proportions.

I entered the dimensions of the center panel, added a narrow pieced border, then auditioned a variety of border widths and swag placements.  I realized that three swags along the vertical borders would have different dimensions than the two along the horizontal borders, and that it would be much easier to keep all the swags the same size.  This meant placing only two swags along the vertical borders and leaving a space that would have to be filled with something else.

Having determined the dimensions of the swag, I was able to print it to size from EQ6 to use as a template.

Now I was ready to start filling the swag with fruit, but I quickly ran into trouble.  How could I balance size, shape, color and scale?  How would I handle the way elements overlapped?  After a few false starts, I came up with the following approach.

I printed pages and pages of colored photographs of fruit – different sizes, different angles, different hues.  Then I cut them out and arranged them on the swag template like a collage.  In this way, I was able to create a balanced composition for my swag design.

From here, I traced the collage to produce a line drawing.  I made templates for each patch (over 150 of them!) and chose fabrics.  But I still had some nagging doubts.  How could I be sure of the best background fabric for the borders until the swags were appliquéd?  What if I changed my mind about their placement when everything came together?  To keep my options open, I came up with this final approach.

I decided to appliqué each patch in the swag onto a muslin background, leaving the outside edges just basted.  This had the added benefit of being much easier to work with than long strips of border fabric!

When the appliqué and embroidery were complete, I removed the basting thread and trimmed the muslin along the outside edges of the swag.  I now had a complete unit to appliqué onto the border strips.

These border swags may have tested me creatively, but with persistence, ingenuity, and some good ole’ trial and error, each challenge was overcome.  Don’t give up, because you never know what you can do until you try!

If you have been following along, you will recall that this quilt was inspired by a passage in John 15:  “I am the vine; you are the branches.  If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit.”  The completed center panel represents the vine and the branches, so the borders needed the fruit!

All along, I had been visualizing swags for the outer borders.  I remembered seeing swags filled with fruit in a Dover book of Empire Designs and hoped I might be able to adapt one of them for my quilt.  Franz Sales Meyer, in his Handbook of Ornament, describes clusters of fruit hanging in a curve as festoons.  Fruit festoons were popular decorative elements in Roman, Renaissance, and later styles.  Unfortunately, there was not sufficient detail in these sketches for an appliqué design.

Drawing my own version from scratch was a daunting prospect.  How would I maintain the scale of each type of fruit?  How would I handle the way the elements overlapped?  And what about color?  I would need to use color to help identify each variety of fruit but at the same time coordinate with the palette in the center panel.  How could I balance colors in a line drawing?

Then there was size and shape to think about.  The quilt is rectangular, so how many swags would fit best on each side?  How wide would the borders have to be?  How could I balance the elements in the long vertical borders with those in the shorter horizontal borders?  Yikes, did I even have what it would take?

As they say, you never know what you can do until you try.  Here is one appliquéd swag – one festoon of fruit – and next week I will answer all these questions and tell you how I came up with the design.

In 2009, my quilt Instruments of Praise won first prize for Innovative Appliqué at the IQA judged show Quilts: A World of Beauty.  It seemed fitting that my entry into the silent auction should somehow represent this quilt.  Here it is:  Trumpets of Praise.  It is a reproduction of one of the four blocks in the original quilt – the trumpet block – and measures 24″ x 24″.

The original quilt was hand appliquéd but because of the tight deadline, the motifs in Trumpets of Praise were fused and machine appliquéd.  The same detailed machine quilting, including trapunto, was incorporated into the mini quilt.  Even the backing fabric is true to its predecessor!

Instruments of Praise was inspired by the words of Psalm 150.

Praise the Lord.

Praise God in his sanctuary;
praise him in his might heavens.
Praise him for his acts of power;
praise him for his surpassing greatness.

Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet,
praise him with the harp and lyre,
praise him with tambourine and dancing,
praise him with the strings and flute,
praise him with the clash of cymbals,
praise him with resounding cymbals.

Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord.

Here is your chance to own a piece of the multi-award winning quilt Instruments of Praise.  Support the International Quilt Association and place your bid at the Celebrity Mini Quilt Silent Auction this November!

I designed the center panel as I have designed much of my recent work.  I drew one-quarter of the design to scale, then flipped it and rotated it to complete the entire design.  But I worked in sections, just as I have been describing them to you.  (To see the previous 6 sections, visit the category Flourish on the Vine.)  I traced a section at a time onto the background fabric; fabric selections were made for each section once the previous section was appliquéd.  So, while I had a pretty good idea of what it was going to look like, I hadn’t seen the entire center panel until sections 7 and 8 were stitched. 

Section 7 Left Side

Section 7 Right Side

Sections 7 and 8 are quite similar.  One runs horizontally across the top and bottom edge of the center panel; the other runs vertically down each side.  Once again, each section has a left and right side, meeting in the center and joining up with sections 2 and 3.  Section 8 also joins with section 6.

Section 8 Left Side

Section 8 Right Side

There are quite a number of patches in these last two sections:  26 in section 7 and 28 in section 8.  With these sections repeating four times, a total of 216 patches were added to the appliqué.  This brings the final tally to 182 individual patches and 665 total patches in the entire center panel.  It’s a good thing I didn’t count them before I started!

So, what comes next?  Borders.  The first border will be a frame for the center panel.  I’ve done a small mock-up but I haven’t tried it on full size.  This is because I am waiting until the appliqué on the second border is completed and I can view everything together.  Stay tuned!