TIA CURTIS QUILTS: I have also been making faces.

Friday, February 10, 2017

I have also been making faces.

Hello there!

Since I am making the time to blog, I wanted to show you my newest obsession. Face Quilts! I took a workshop with the one and only Melissa Averinos when she came to Kansas City Modern Quilt Guild back in October. It was one of the best workshops I have ever participated in. If you get the chance to take a workshop with her, do it! Melissa taught us the basics of drawing faces and then how she cuts shapes for eyes, nose, mouth and eye brows. Then she turned us loose. It was so fun, so very very different from what I normally do that I felt so refreshed! Well, I left the workshop with 2 lady faces and a cat face, but I was a little lost about what to do next. I mean, I knew the next step was to quilt them, but there are so many tiny pieces. This is all raw edge and glue stick (glue stick is my newest favorite sewing notion) so it was going to take some serious custom quilting to tack everything down. I hung them up on my design wall and did a bunch of quilts. Well, then I got an email from Melissa and she wanted to know if I wanted to put a face in her book? Uhhhh....Yep. She is writing a book!!!! Yay! And of course I wanted to submit a face or two to her book. No problem.

At this point I decided I needed to finish them. I still didn't want to quilt them though.....until my eyes landed on the chore my daughter was working on. I hired her to tidy up my studio and there was this crazy piece of tutu toile. That netting stuff. It was leftover from some sort of art project and was splattered with glitter paint. I had a stroke of epiphany! The netting would hold all those little bits down! OMG folks. This was a game changer. It became so darn fun to quilt these ladies that I would make them while the Statler quilted edge to edge quilts. When I would get enough faces glued down I would load up a quilt back, lay down some batting, next comes the face quilts and finally the netting. Then I quilted them with straight lines. They still needed more so I changed out the thread to black and used the black like shading. That was the magic for me. The netting gives the quilts the best feel and heaviness. Very arty.

I love these faces and my husband totally makes fun of my crazy band I am making in the basement. So far the ladies are stacking up in the studio with no real plan after being quilted. All I know is that I have many more planned in my future. So so fun.