These little guys were so much fun to make. They’re made of felt, stuffed, and meant to be used as Christmas tree decorations, but it would be tempting to hang one almost anywhere just to bring a smile to your face whenever you see it.
The colorful rectangles are fabric bookmarks with folded ribbon tabs. They’re interfaced with fusible fleece, so they feel like miniature quilts! Both projects will be for sale at the Solana Beach Historical Society’s Holiday Boutique in November 2017.
This is my take on Rick Roberts’ Kitchen Table video demonstrating how to weave Diva Dance through Paradox. I tried to add Betweed, but it didn’t want to “weave” with Diva Dance like Paradox does. I was going to color the blobs in Diva Dance red for Valentine’s Day, but since it already looked as if an aorta and vena cava were entering and leaving a heart, I decided black blobs with hot pink accents might look less anatomical.
For Christmas 2016 I gave Sach books, a book gift certificate, and a tangled bookmark with her name on one side and a variation of the tangle pattern Ponio on the other side. The tangle patterns I used for her name are S=Strircles, A=Afterglo, C=Cayla, H=Huggins.
These cards were created for the Solana Beach Historical Society Holiday Boutique held on November 12, 2016. I grouped them below into grid designs, whimsy bouquets, Aquafleur variations, and Showgirl variations.
Grid Designs:
Whimsy Bouquets:
Aquafleur Variations:
Showgirl Variations:
Wedding Card for Shana and Trevor
I filled a heart with multiple tangle patterns to create a wedding card. Found that I had to choose very simple patterns with a lot of white space or the heart looked way too busy and dark, especially at the center. Garlic Cloves along the top left edge is the only “dark” pattern because the pointy corner of the space had white areas on either side of it. Hope the bride and groom get a kick out of this card. The heart ended up closer to the top edge when I folded it in half to form a card, so I wove a bit of ribbon into the bottom edge. Oh well . . . c’est la vie.
Diana’s Birthday Card
I tangled this card for Diana for her 70th birthday. Paper is Canson’s Mix Media XL, 98 lb, 7″ x 10″ that I folded to a 5″ x 7″ card. The pattern is Olb by Helen Williams drawn on a wonky grid with a variety of fill-ins, including Helen’s Leaflet pattern “vein” fill-in. Shading done in ink and pencil.
Diana asked our mutual friend, Lloyd, to mat and frame this card. Below is a photo of the framed card.
A Valentine’s Day card for Gil decorated with Helen Williams’s simple and beautiful zentangle pattern Heart Offset. Inside text: Be Our Valentine with Love from Your Girls — Zoey Karen CiCi.
Karen’s bag for exercise class
I made this bag in December 2015 from brocade or tapestry fabric because I needed a smallish, strong bag that could safely hold a full bottle of water plus hand weights for an exercise class. The fabric was a remnant that I bought for $5 at a crafts bazaar. The lining (not shown) was from a Japanese silk brocade panel that I found in the bottom of my mother’s sewing cabinet. It must have sat in that cabinet for over 40 years. It might have been a panel that’s normally used for an obi — a decorative and functional outer belt to hold kimonos closed — although the fabric felt a little more flexible than some obi fabrics that I’ve felt.
The bag is approximately 12″ x 11″ x 5″ with a band or rim stitched to the upper edge into which the handles were sewn. The lining begins where the rim was stitched to the bag. I like this construction because you can’t easily see the lining this way. I adapted a pattern I found on the web at the Pink Penguin blog (http://ayumills.blogspot.com/2010/08/tutorial-lunch-bag.html). The adaptations I made were to enlarge it and eliminate the drawstring cover. The really interesting thing about this pattern is that the 5″ depth is created by stitching two rectangles together, folding the stitched corners so that points form, and then stitching across the folded corners. Quick and easy and strong to hold all the weight!
Colored pencil shading on tangle pattern Narwal.
This is a card with the tangle pattern Narwal that I tried to shade with Faber-Castell Polychromos colored pencils. Paper was Canson’s Mix Media 98 lb. Lots of room for improvement here.
Starflower (Side 1): This side was made using traditional quilt-piecing technique with scraps from previous projects. Click to enlarge.
A Circle of Geese (Side 2): This side was made using paper-piecing technique with the same fabric scraps from Side 1 plus four additional fabrics. Click to enlarge.
This bag was made for our good friend Diana Abraham to hold her personal items when she goes on cruises. Like Gerry’s bag, this one is padded with fusible fleece interfacing for shape and support. Since it’s unlikely anyone would ever see both sides of this bag at the same time, I decided to make different quilt blocks for each side. I let Diana choose the designs she liked. A Circle of Geese (Side 2) forced me to try a quilting technique named paper-piecing that I hadn’t tried before. I found paper-piecing to be more time-consuming than traditional quilt-piecing technique, but I can appreciate that some designs may be easier to produce or easier to reproduce reliably with paper-piecing. Diana’s favorite color is turquoise. Luckily, many colors look great against turquoise, so this gave me a lot of leeway in finding suitable fabric scraps for these designs.
tomatoworm 