I am making my third tropical fish quilt. The first is on its way home to me after hanging in a show in San Jose. While there, someone saw it, love it and wanted one in a different size. The other was made for an auction to support a day shelter for at risk women and children in Santa Rosa. So I am working on the commission piece. After seeing Terry’s method of Liquifuse applique, I decided I had to give it a try. I do a lot of beading on these quilts so Wonder Under is out of the question. For the other two, I did a temporary gluing with glue stick – which is not very stable.

I select fabric for a watery background, sandwich it and quilt it before adding the fish and beads.

I make freezer paper templates for each section of the fish, making sure there is a seam allowance for fusing the pieces together. Here are my fish templates, after they were cut from fabric.

After cutting each template, I added the diluted Liquifuse to the edges of each piece. The, using Teflon sheets, I assembled each fish as a unit. Today, while I was making fish, Mia and Milo were visiting and coloring in coloring books and chatting with me. Pure bliss!! I digress. Here are the assembled fish positioned on the background. Now, all I have to do  is iron them down and do some stitching and I am ready to bead. Inspired by Judy, I am adding a sea horse this time and of course there Will be octopi! These fish need some eyes!!

In my spare time, I am still trying to get the studio organized. I have been sorting fabric. These piles are my commercial fabrics. I still have batiks, hand-dyes and silks. I am sorting all of these by colors. I obviously need to get rid of some more fabric. I’ll never use all of this. Most of this is from my early days.  So I am going to cull through it and take some to Scrap to donate. I used to give it to my guild for the community quilt program.

Tomorrow night is first Thursday gallery night in downtown Portland and our Artist’s Among Us show will be open. The gala opening reception is on Friday night. On Saturday afternoon, I am helping by staffing the show, So guess I have my dance card all full for a few days. I’ll try to remember my camera so that I can post some photos.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.