Quilting Strippy Landscapes | National Quilters Circle

today I'm going to show you how to do a stripping landscape I live in the mountains in Colorado and I love the mountains but I also really love the water and so I want to have a little water scene so that I can remember the waves the crashing of the waves and the sand and the Blues of the water so this is what we're going to make today and first thing you want to do is start thinking about what kind of landscape you want to make I had in my mind's eye what I wanted to make but I also knew I wanted to look at some photos to get some further inspiration so let me show you a couple photos and some of the things I was looking for as you start to look at the different water scenes you can see that there's not just one color of water it goes from blue to blue green there's some blue violet in there too and the water the water changes depending on the depth below it and depending on what's what's underneath it sometimes it's rocky which makes it a little darker sometimes it's sandy which makes it a little bit lighter when you're usually when you're looking at landscapes when you're looking at scenery the colors are more intense the closer they are to you and so you've got dark dark mountains at the front and the further the mountains go away the lighter they are in color with water it tends to be the opposite you have lighter colors of blue at the closer to you and darker colors of blue the further away you go and that's again because you've got the depth going on in different different things happening underneath the water so it's different if you're doing a mountain scene from doing a water scene one other thing I want to show you in the photos is not to Center your horizon or your transition point it's much better to follow the rule of thirds and put your horizon as you see in these photos at one third of the way you can do it at one third from the bottom or one third from the top but you'll create much more interest in your landscape if you're at a Third Point rather than in the center so with with my design in mind next thing I want to do is start gathering my fabrics and pulling together lots and lots of strips of a variety of blues to get my water fabric in place okay so now I have a lot of Bluth blue fabric cut into strips I cut these about two inches wide you want to can go anywhere from one and a half to three three and a half inches wide all depending on what size you want your finished project to be the length of these strips is approximately the width of what my final project will be so it'll be driven by the shortest strip that ends up in the final project so I've got blues I've got blue greens I've got going from dark to light and I arranged them in what I think is probably light to dark so I can begin to make those decisions about where they're going to stay in place and value sometimes can be really hard to see when you've got colorant on top of it so I made photocopies I did a black and white photo copy of these strips so that I could see exactly where they are and when you start to look at the black and white photo you can see this strip here which is this one here is a little darker it probably could move up in place we've got a lot of a lot of contrast going on in a couple of these strips where there's a lot of dark and light and when you're working with boutique's that's going to happen as well where you just have to look at and decide is this is this too is there too much going on to make it fit into what I'm working towards and some of the some of the light parts in the dark area of the blue I really like because it looks like the water the Sun sunlight sparkling on the water so doing it if you're having trouble seeing the value of your fabric doing a black and white photocopy or using a digital camera and and editing your photo to be black and white is a really good way to see what's going on with the value and so once I did that I then I started looking at okay which ones do I want to take out I know that I cut more than I'm going to need so that I have space to edit these when you cut the strips sometimes it looks very different than where you started with the original fabric and as much as this one has the yellow which could be sunlight sparkling on it I didn't like it because the pattern was too regular for me I wanted something a little more organic than that so I took that one out and this one I decided was too short and so I took that one out now if I wanted to I if I wanted to keep it in I could always sew another little piece on the end just to make it longer but that wasn't necessary I like the little model going on by Perry don't need both of these in here so I'll take one of those out and I know I took some leaves out because I know there's plants going on in the in under water but I didn't want leaves flooded on the top and when I was looking at it especially I was looking at the black and white I didn't like the splotchiness of this that I like that I like this part but this was a little too much going on so I took this one out and I just kept editing and saying okay which ones do I like which ones do I want to take out and figure it out until I ended up with the final arrangement of my water and then I did the exact same thing with the sand fabric so that I end up with all the all the strips of fabric that I want to use in order on a design board so it's real easy than to pull pull them off in orders I begin to sell and we're ready to start making the project now okay so now you have your fabrics all in order on your design board it's time to start sewing so I take a piece of backing and a piece of batting and you want to make them a little bit bigger than you're aiming for your finished project the good thing about this is it's pretty organic so you don't really have to cut certain size you're just aiming for a little bigger than you want your finished project to be protect your surface and use spray base to put these together be sure to spray the backing fabric not the batting spray the backing lightly and then smooth the batting out on top of that after you do that it can help to eyeball about a third of the way up and mark a line so that you know where that transition point is so I'm doing a little bit of sand and more water so my transition point will be towards the bottom of my project so then I'll take my first to my fabrics so my first fabric at the bottom which because it's a batik doesn't really have a right or wrong side but because I wanted this one longer than the strip I had and I pieced it together this one does have a right and a wrong side so I want it right sides up lay that one at the bottom take your next strip and if you have a definite difference you want to put them right sides together but don't sew them straight on like this create a little more interest by creating an angle and after you create your angle you want to pin it in place a few spots to hold it so that you can take it to the sewing machine and you're just going to sew a regular quarter inch seam along here once you've done that you'll want to trim off the edge by the seam allowance you'll press this forward and then you're going to keep building it and let me show you a few a few strips sewn on so you can see here now that I've got angles going I try to vary them so that they're going happening to the opposite ends I don't always start at the very top sometimes I want to create this shallower so I'll start not at the edge of this of the fabric but but in a little bit and again a little bit of an angle pin trim and press and again I've got my line here so I know I'm aiming to this spot here so my sand will go from here to here and then I will transition to my water fabric and you keep doing that until you have all of your fabrics in place so I've got my sand I've got my darker stand by the water's edge I've got the white foamy water here and building all the way out to the darks and now the fun thing about this is because you've got all three layers together you have been quilting as you sew so as you build the top you're doing a quilt as you go project as well and you could finish this at this point and call it done but first I want to show you what adding a little more quilting at this stage can do to create even more variety and interest okay so you have your your pieces all sewn together and I want to show you the difference that adding more quilting to the project makes I used a variety of threads these are all silky blendable and what I like about the blendable x' is that the colors change at random lengths and so you've got in this case yellows yellow greens blue greens going on but they are all changing randomly so that helps add interest to the quilting as well and so on the quilting you can see that I added some 10 till curtain lines sometimes they're more shallow than others sometimes they echo the line above them and sometimes there they've got a little more movement in them I used each color for maybe two three four lines of quilting and then it would change to the next color and be blending them blending the colors the same way I was blending fabrics I did try to make sure that I would bring a line of quilting that would cross over the fabric seams and you can see that here and again that just helps create the movement of water so that's I liked I liked it a lot better once I've added the quilting to it there are some other things you can do if you're interested in having more than just a water scene and let me pull thread out if you for example want a sailboat in your water you could applicate a sailboat to the water and I would do that before adding the additional quilting because and you can add quilting lines to help mimic the movement of the boat through the water if you do machine embroidery you could add a palm tree and again I would do that before I did the quilting the additional quilting so that you can quilt around it so you can applicate things to this you can do machine embroidery on it you can use this background in a lot of different ways to create the scene that you're looking for and those are the things you would do before you finish it after you've got this completed you've done all the quilting all the applique or embroidery on it that you want you would trim your edges up square and then you would finish it I finished mine with the facing and there are a few more things I want to show you that you can do after you've got the top completely finished just a couple more ideas if you want to embellish your piece a little further I remember as a little girl walking on a family vacation and picking up shells at Virginia Beach and so I wanted to see how I could add some shells to this so I took a little piece of tulle and can throw some shells down on top of the tool and then very carrot you know bring bring the tool around create a little pocket out of the tool and very carefully hand Stitch this in place bring your stitches in close around the edges of the shells to hold them in place and the tool basically disappears and you've got shells on your beach now and it addition to that if you want to create more Sparkle you could definitely add beads into into the water and onto the sand and again you would sew these down by hand and create even more motion and more interest as you take a look at these so those are some just some of my ideas of how you could further embellish the beach scene this will be great when I actually get to those parts on that don't you think one more thing I want to show you if you start with a bigger panel you can create a beach bag so this is all the exact same technique that I just showed you it's just a much bigger panel these these probably started 40 inches wide full width of the fabric and created a beach bag so again my transition point is about a third up but the one thing I did have to do is make sure I had enough on the bottom so my sand was actually a little bit longer this time when I created the panel so I had enough space to create the bottom on the sand so whether it's the ocean or the mountains whatever your favorite nature scene is it's I've had a lot of fun creating these and I hope you do too

Channel: National Quilters Circle

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Keywords: quilting, quilting tips, quilt, quilt tips, sew, sew quilts, sewing, quilt patterns, quilt projects, quilting projects, quilting patterns, national quilters circle, nqc, quilter, quilting videos, quilt videos, quilting how to, stitching, learn to quilt, quilting class, quilt class, National Quilt Museum (Museum)

Id: mrpzko7S2rQ

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 14 2014