Archive

I did a little printmaking and a lot of mulling (without the wine – though that sounds like a great idea!) working through ideas for Elizabeth’s quilt. I didn’t come up with any workable prints, though I did have a lot of fun printing (haven’t done that for a while).   More importantly I figured out […]

I’ve been trying to figure out how to sew the squares together. With the quilts I’ve done to date I’ve sewn the pieces together on a pellon (interfacing) backing and then lined the squares up, overlapped the pellon backing and sewn the squares together. I’ve used heavy black thread with a zigzag overstitching technique and […]

Before starting in on the quilting of the other squares I laid all of them out in sequence to see how they would look all lined up: This was the most complicated printing job that I’ve undertaken to date. I used the cold composition techniques that I learned in the workshop that I took earlier […]

I’ve been thinking of the pattern to use for the next quilt in the series, the one for my great grandmother Cassie Hodgman. I have been thinking of some variation of the interlocking circles pattern. So I’ve had circles in my head. Today I made a stencil (drawing on what I learned from my workshop […]

Really, I know how to count. I make a cheat sheet for each of the quilts at the start to help plan things out and to let me know how many of each shape/print/book page I need to cut out. The math is fairly straightforward: you take the number of a particular shape/print combo that […]

Slow going again this week. 93° and muggy today. I’ve found that I can get some sewing done early in the mornings before it gets too hot. Then later in the day when it gets sticky I sew for short stretches then let everything cool down while I crochet for a bit, then clean off […]

A couple of people have asked if sewing the waxed dipped paper and the encaustic prints causes the sewing machine to gum up. I’ve answered back that, no it doesn’t really but I have to stop from time to time to clean off the footer. After a while sewing I start to feel the footer […]

I’m working more on the individual squares for Grace’s quilt and have pieced a few together. They are sewing together rather nicely, all straightforward geometric pieces. Getting the squares to go together is another thing entirely. It’s always more difficult to get the squares to fit together, they end up being slightly different sizes and […]

Got back to working on Grace’s quilt this week. I managed to pick a ridiculously muggy day to dip the cut up book pages. Nothing like standing over an electric wok full of melted encaustic medium for a few hours on a nice humid summer day on the coast of Maine. Something I hadn’t anticipated […]

I feel SO GUILTY. I didn’t post anything last week! I always seem to forget something when I go on a trip, this time it was my laptop bag. I was away at the International Encaustic Conference in Provincetown last week and had a wonderful time but was wracked with guilt the whole time that […]