ELAINE QUEHL, Quilt Artist, Teacher, Dyer, Designer

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

A Peek at my Northcott Fabric Line

Yesterday Fed Ex brought me a small sampling of some of my Northcott fabric line. I need to make samples of the quilt pattern I designed virtually back in January, so that Northcott can take them to Quilt Market in Pittsburgh next week. So I received samples of the fabrics that are required for my pattern.

This is the Spring Rain colour way.

And this is the Autumn Harvest colour way.

I think my favorite of the selection I received, is this printed fabric of my wonky-pieced blocks. The inspiration for this fabric was a quilt I made several years ago, and that appears at the end of this blog post.

Kinda strange to see my name on the selvedge of a fabric. Even though I've had my own line of one-of-a kind fabrics for many years now, they don't have a selvedge with my name on!


So this morning at 2:30 a.m. I finished fusing the samples, and they are heading back to Northcott by FedEx so they can be quilted by their long-arm quilter and taken to Quilt Market next week.  

This is my original quilt that inspired the fabric line. No there isn't a pattern for this one because all the blocks are cut and pieced free-hand.  The pattern above is suitable for beginners because you can purchase a background fabric that looks like the background in my quilt, and the leaves are created with fusible applique. While creating the samples from my pattern, I was reminded of why I became an art quilter. I can't follow instructions (or maybe I don't want to), I can't stay on the line, and I always want to change it up a bit.

Even though I've been using fusible web for more than a decade, I learned a lot about how to use it with commercial fabrics last night. I've got a big blog post coming all about fusible web and how to survive the Steam a Seam shortage.  In the mean time, I have to start prepping for Friday's Dye Happy class.  This week's topic is shibori. I'll be back to talk about fusibles.  


2 comments:

  1. Wow, they gave you a lot of time to complete your samples, didn't they? Love your fabric, it's like having high-end "cheater cloth". Great info on the fusing issues, I've had fraying happen to me before so I haven't been a real fan of the technique. Now I know that I was probably using the wrong stuff.

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  2. Yes, I think the idea is to enable a beginner to make something similar to my quilt that inspired this line, but without the work and skill of making those wonky-pieced blocks. In a nutshell, and I should probably write a nutshell blog post: if you are using batiks or my hand-dyes, you can use any fusible you want, as they are really tough high thread count cottons. For other commercial fabrics, be careful as the really tacky fusibles make the fabric shred and fray while you are pulling away the paper! Use a less tacky fusible like Steam a Seam Lite (the one with only one backing paper isn't as sticky). I have not heard this said anywhere but I concluded it from my experience this week. All my work is raw edged.

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