A TOUCH OF BRASS

Finally, I've been able to get some work completed.....a good thing since my teaching schedule this month will probably prevent me from working on my projects.....

Each August the Asheville Quilt Guild has their annual Quilt Show at the beautiful Western North Carolina Arboretum. It's one of the very special stops for the participants on my Great Smoky Mountain Quilting Tour...... Because the tour will keep me from volunteering at the show, I wanted to donate a small piece for their silent auction.....here it is:

I used National Nonwoven's Bamboo/Rayon felt.....which I LOVE! The black background piece is stabilized with Pellon's Lightweight non-fusible stabilizer. The layers have been hand basted together with white thread, the basting line measures the exact finished size I want the piece to be. This way I can audition my design motifs within that space.

Instead of featuring my trademark - beading - as the major design element, I decided to focus on some brass elements I uncovered during some recent reorganizing. I've done some simply straight stitching on the brown bamboo/rayon felt and using some fabulous hand dyed Perle cotton threads by Nancy Bruce, I attached several felt circles with hand embroidery. The background seemed to need texture so I machine stitched a few circles.....

.....which I hated.....and then removed...... I also didn't like the 'sun' motif and decided to replace it with a few more brass 'do dads' which were stitched in place later.

After much pondering, I dug out some Aurifil wool thread and using a big stitch, added texture the background had been lacking.

Now all the design elements are secured. I've squared my background piece and machine stitched it to a backing that is about 2" larger in all directions.

To cover the raw edge of the embellished center, I prepared 4 strips of fabric, each about 1" wide and 1" longer than the quilt (which includes the backing fabric which extends beyond the center rectangle.)

I did some simple machine straight stitching on these strips of fabric to add more interest and to add a bit more strength to the fabric. Next, one at a time, each was positioned so that the center of the strip was over the raw edge of the embellished rectangle. Because the backing is larger than that center section....it becomes the back of each of the strips.....any excess backing fabric is trimmed away once each strip is secured by machine stitching around all four edges.

A Touch of Brass - 11 1/2" x 9 1/2"

Copyright 2010 Mary Stori