Last week we had a very interesting speaker at my quilting guild. Sue Pelland, of Sue Pelland Designs, is a quilter who loves to do applique work, but as a busy Mom, she was frustrated by the time it took to cut out all of the pieces for applique. She invented a set of templates to allow you to cut curved applique pieces with a rotary cutter and one of the curved templates (they come in three sizes).
She showed us lots of quilts and did a demo with her bright orange curvy templates. There was a camera set up to project the view of her cutting on a table (so the next couple of pictures are of the projection on the wall.
You can cut many variations and sizes of shapes. Here she has cut some basic leaf shapes.
After moving the template to a different position, she cut these "S" curved shapes.
Sue uses a chalk line to snap a grid on the background fabric and then the placement of the shapes is easy and everything stays straight. Before cutting the fabric, she adheres a very lightweight and flexible fusible web called "MistyFuse." She can cut four or five layers at a time to quickly make bunches of leaves.
This tiny miniature quilt was made to showcase some fabric "inchies" (are inchies still popular with papercrafters? I haven't seen much talk about them lately...).
The segments are fused and a blanket stitch is worked around the edges. The thick inchies are simply adhered with fabric glue.
The "S" curved pieces can be combined to form a ribbon or a rope effect. She worked on a craft sheet and overlapped and ironed the shapes together so they could be lifted as one unit and placed on the background cloth for the quilt.
I have some photos that I took at the meeting (mostly from a chair with a small camera but I think they will give you an idea of the beauty of these quilts). I was inspired to see how she came up with an idea to fill her need and was able to bring it to market to help other applique artists and quilters.
The long blue lines in this quilt are actually the background showing through below the appliqued curved shapes. The orange shapes represent koi in a pond.
The templates were used to curved the diamond shapes in the center of this quilt. This is all applique - not curved piecing.
Some of the leftover shapes were used to create the outer border on this quilt.
This placement has both basic leaf shapes and some trimmed shapes that form the poinsettia.
This quilt was one of my favorites
More leaf shapes combined in a different way for this mini quilt.
This large quilt uses all three sizes of templates for the center, the leafy border and to trim the serpentine edge of the quilt before finishing.
I know that a lot of my readers have at least dabbled in quilting and I thought this new technique and tool might be interesting to you. There are some video demonstrations of the tools in action on Sue's website, Sue Pelland Designs. She also has a blog and a newsletter which are linked from the main webpage.
I really enjoyed her talk and demonstration and the quilts were all so vibrant with color. I hope you'll stop over to her site to take a look. Even if you are not a quilter, there is a lot of design inspiration that will transfer nicely to papercrafts!
Lettering Delights Sale
I thought you should know that Lettering Delights is having a Clearance Sale on some items that will be discontinued in their store. There are some great bundles and the individual items are only 50 cents each if you don't want everything in the bundle. Click on "What's New" near the top of the page to find the special sale bundles or choose individual items from the bundles.
Lettering Delights also has a new Thin Line Fonts bundle for pen writing and drawing, The fonts work with Make the Cut software and a compatible cutting machine. The entire bundle is $50 (regular price would be $70) and you can buy any of the four individual sets of ten fonts for $15 each. The bundle also includes some rustic line drawing sketches that are very nice.
If you go a little crazy shopping, there is a code for $25 off a purchase of $60 or more. Just put STEPANDSAVE in the box at checkout.
If you have any questions about the quilts or the Lettering Delights items, please let me know.
I hope you have a great day!
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