Cassowary is Finished

Wow...I worked for most of last week on this to get him done and today I finished him.

I am just a little bit proud of this...nothing about this project came easy to me. Each section had its own challenging little things and some of them I did get right and some of them I did not.

In general, I think I thread painted a bit heavily in parts and some of the shading is a bit wonky, but I am more than happy with it. Actually cannot believe I managed to do this.

And here he is...the finished Cassowary done in an online workshop with Sophie Standing...must say I now know this bird intimately...looked at every little hair, every shading, the way the funny red tubular things run...

Can't tell you how impressed I am with my handiwork. Learned a lot about thread painting and how important tiny detail is (and how easy it is to get things wrong). 

Close up

Now it's back to quilting for me!

Karin

Progress on WIPs

Had my second day of the Elizabeth Hartman workshop. Had not done any more work on the blocks other than cutting my pieces out for the owl block.

Well, the owl did take the whole session from 9.30am to 2.30pm. It had so many tiny pieces and was a bit challenging for my brain in terms of getting them oriented the right way around. Worked very slowly as I did not want to mess it up. I only need one owl for the wall hanging and I definitely did not want to do another one.

Here it is...the owl

Came out rather nice although I think I should have chosen more muted colours for the middle section. My colours just seem to blend together. Good to know though, will remember this if I have to do another one. Now I only got the thistles, hedgehog and another fox to go.

This will have to wait a bit though, as I am also doing the Cassowary project run by Sophie Standing in an online workshop and it is taking forever to advance from one section to the next. I think since last time I managed to complete the beak and chin and am now halfway up the horn. Well, I wanted a challenge and I must say, this is very challenging for me as I never done thread painting before.

So my thread painting looks much more like thread embroidery...my stitching tends to become very build up very quickly. Probably because I am making lots of mistakes so I always have to go over things again until I feel that I got it right. You have no idea of what this is like for a seasoned freemotion quilter with a healthy perfectionist streak. Looking at my scribbling it is almost torturous! Mind you there were a few moments when I thought that I was getting the hang of it, particularly when doing the chin area...that jelled really well with me for some reason and I am really proud of how that turned out with the yellow markings in it. Today I did the left half of the horn and I must say that was extraordinarily tricky...still not completely happy with it but sometimes it is easier to just step back for a while and try again another day.

Enjoying the challenge though, it's good to push yourself to do something completely out of your comfort zone once in a while.

One thing is for sure, this is going to take a while... 

Linking up to Midweek Makers over at Quilt Fabrication.

Karin

Work in Progress

My blog posts are going to be all over the place for a little while as I am working on several things all at once. Bit of bad planning on my part...

I am doing two workshops at the moment...the Cassowary one with Sophie Standing online and then also an Elizabeth Hartman workshop in person at our local sewing shop.

The Elizabeth Hartman workshop started Monday and only has two sessions, one occurred  this week and another one next week. We are doing a wall hanging from the Fancy Forest pattern. Thought that this would be great practice to tackle the Fancy Forest quilt towards the end of the year.

I only managed to do two animals on Monday...

 The fox which I am familiar with and then the rabbit which was a tad more challenging. In fact I had to do some sections several times as I kept forgetting some pieces. Not used to working in a group setting.

I am making this wall hanging out of the leftover fabrics from the Shannon Brinkley fabric range. Should come out nice. I chose a dark chocolate brown as the background which I already had in my stash,  which is a bit lighter than the photo depicts.

Then today I continued on the Cassowary project. Almost had performance anxieties over this...never thread painted before and we started with the eye, of all things! So today, I just went for it, hoping for the best...

Not too bad...still have some fine tuning to do but managed to somehow make my way around the eye. Got completely lost under the eye and now have a rather dark patch sitting there...I am hoping that I can go over this with some blue meander to made that less obvious. Very interesting actually...I will have to watch this getting lost on your piece. I think it had to do with the tiny piece of fabric that I had sitting around the eye. As soon as that was covered with thread, I lost all orientation and the way it was drawn. Another completely new thing to me is stitching in a hoop. Very different from FMQ. In FMQ I have my fingers very close to where I am stitching and with the hoop I found that my hand forever wanted to go inside the hoop which then made moving around very awkward. Will have to work on that. Otherwise all good...I think I can make my way through this somehow. In general I think that my stitching might be a bit dense but as I have no experience to compare this with, I am just running with it.

Should all be very interesting!

Karin

Cassowary Online Workshop with Sophie Standing

I have been busy...the Cassowary Workshop started on the 14 May. Many firsts for me in this one. I dyed my background fabric! Never ventured out into dyeing anything, so together with my daughter we had some fun getting some colour onto this background. Would have liked to experiment a bit more now that my interest has been sparked, but that would have taken another few weeks of researching and trying it out. There is always next time. Got lots of ideas from this workshop.

Also, correction from my last post - Sophie Standing lives in Kenya rather than S.Africa which I mentioned in my last post about the workshop. Not entirely sure where I got that from. Anyway, the workshop is run over a private FB group and we had an introductory live session with Sophie which was just lovely. Lots to learn and lots of opportunity to ask questions and support each other. 

I made a start this week and managed to get the bird down on the background (look at my fun background).

Next comes the thread painting...

I have never done thread painting before. While I can freemotion quilt, I am beginning to wonder whether I actually can do this. Have a general idea on how that works but feel a tad intimidated by the whole thing. No idea whether this will come naturally to me and am hoping for the best.

Planning to do some practicing over the weekend to get a bit of a feel for it. Luckily Sophie has included many enlarged still photos in the FB group which I find really helpful to see how she filled in particular sections. I am going to be a complete copycat and do exactly what she does...this is too new to me to start experimenting with. Maybe on the next project. I am hoping that once I get the hang of this it will become self-explanatory on how to move over the bird.

Challenge plus, but should be so worth it once it is finished.

Should also mention that this workshop has been brought to us by Lesley Mays from Patchwork & Craft Mildura. If you get a chance check them out - lots of very interesting workshops available through the shop.

Karin