penny-studionotes-2

About a month ago, I did two days of workshops with Lisa Binkley on bead embroidery.  I've been making embroidered hamsot for a few years (see post here ).  Here are a couple of them:     I've been thinking for a while that they would look nice with the some beaded embellishment, so when I saw Lisa's workshops being offered close by, I signed up. The top photo is one of the samplers I started at the workshop, all done according to specific instructions, with beads provided. I enjoyed doing the beading, and am eager to try it out on a new hamsa. One of the attractions for me is that it gave me the opportunity to open up my mother's wicker box of beading paraphernalia, to see if there was anything I could use. My mother did many crafts, including knitting (always a mainstay), crochet, macrame, needlepoint, embroidery, rug hooking, and beading. She used beads to make jewelry (mostly necklaces and bracelets), and she loved making beaded flowers . The jewelry ...

As I mentioned in the last post, I purchased about 20 half-yards of Marcia Derse's fabric, which was more than enough for the wedding quilt I was planning. I figured how much I needed for that, and used some of the excess to make placemats for my sister's large, round dining room table.  I used the same design as for my own kitchen table, a wedge shape that works really well on a round table. Here's my own set, made out of Japanese daiwabo fabric: But my sister's table is a lot larger than mine, and the placemats look pretty lonely! I decided to make a round mat for the center of the table, large enough to cover the central glass circle, or perhaps even to cover the black circle of the structural support.  Earlier this summer I started working on it, using fabric left over from the wedding quilt. I decided on improvised curved piecing, constructed one quarter-circle at a time. Here it is in progress:  Once I got beyond the first several arcs, I had to piece chunks of fa...

I've had the pleasure of giving three quilts as wedding presents in the last six months.  I'll show them in the order of the weddings: The March quilt was made from a pattern in Modern Triangle Quilts , by Rebecca Bryan.  Here's a photo from the book: pattern by Rebecca Bryan And here's the version that I made.  you can click (or double-click) on any image to see it larger After consultation with the prospective bride and groom, we changed the background color to a dark indigo (dyed with Dharma's "indigo" color), and tweaked the colors in the blocks include some blues and black. The blue fabrics I used were also hand-dyed (lighter values of the same color used in the background), while the rest were commercial solids. I used the pattern for guidance on placement of the four large triangles (16" tall versus the rest that are 8") and for the approximate proportion of background to blocks. Although the blocks have an improvised look to them, they ar...