I am so thankful to everyone who took the time to look at this and leave such helpful suggestions and comments! I am clearly out of my realm here and I am painfully aware that it shows. But what the heck, I might as well make my learning experience public .  I added more paint last night and this is what it looked like:

I still hated it so this morning I decided to wash it in the washer. I hadn’t heat set anything yet. This is how it came out:

My “moon” is woefully offcenter, if only my horizon line were! Time for more paint. This time I added some Jacquard gold watered down and applied with a foam brush to the center area. I also used more shiva to give it more wave:

I think I might call the the ugly quilt. Wonder if Ami Simms is still doing her contest….. Actually, close up, I like the lok of the gold on top.

I haven’t solved my horizon line issue.  Maybe I will wash over the whole thing with the gold….I am about to conclude that painting is not my thing. I suupose I could use this as a smalll rug. I have this thing about everything having to turn out and be used for something.

Again, feel free to add your 2 cents worth here. Pondering the next step…..and the big question, is it possible to make this worse?

Okay I am finally back to work….at least a little. I pulled a piece back out that I worked on in January but wasn’t happy with.  Remember this?

Someone suggested that I add a sheer fabric over the top. That got me thinking. If I only did the bottom half, it would look like buildings reflected in water. Cool. Today I fould the only piece of sheer fabric I have and tried it out:

Nope. Too shiny, not me. So I decided to add more quilting but use only dark thread on the bottom half and light on the top. Here are the results:

Not enough contrast. Now what? I remembered the Shiva paint sticks I got a while back and tried a few out on a practice quilting scrap. Not bad. Decided I am not liking this piece anyway so I might as well go for it.

Okay, definitely more contrast here. But does it look like I ran over it with my car? This is mostly black so I decided to add some dark blue. I want it to look intentional, not just dirty!

Here is a close up:

I like the way the quilting lines show up like waves. Still not sold on this though, not even close. Not sure what to do next.  I think it looks more unfinished than ever. Thinking I should have left it alone entirely. I will leave it pinned up and think about it a while. This is the first time I have ever tried paint on a quilt and obviously have a lot to learn. Maybe this is just not my thing.

The horizon line bothers me and I don’t know how to fix it.  I welcome any comments, you won’t offend me even if you tell me it is part of the crap quota! Any ideas would be most welcome as well. Please fire away!

That is the title of this piece. My daughter said I should quilt the yellow parts so they look like corn. Then the title of the old quilt pattern, Corn and Beans came into my head and I haven’t been able to get it out! Turns out this is just what I needed for the Metamorphosis challenge on my Yahoo group, Fiberarts Connection. The idea is to take a traditional quilt block, pattern etc. and take inpisration from it for something totally new. I decided I would quilt this in such a way to represent my interpretation of Corn and Beans.

I still need to finish the edges. There is  one thing I am not happy about with this piece, I have some shadowing of the seam allowances in the upper left corner in the yellow.  You can see what I mean here:

It actually looks worse here than in person. The flash from the camera really emphasizes it. I quilted this section last and never noticed this until I had this area under the light of the machine. In person, it is very faint. So I will likely leave it as is. I learned a big lesson here though about watching those seam allowances!

This is the first time I quilted in “pebbles” or circles. I didnt think it was that much fun to do but I do like the effect. I like heavily quilted pieces and I need to come up with new ways to accomplish that. This is another option for me.

I think I will leave it hanging on the design wall for a few days to see if there is anything I can think of to fix the shadowing before I face it.

Our new furnace is getting installed tomorrow. That means I have to heat up the house real hot before they come as I won’t have any heat until they are finished.I have a small space heater for my sewing room so I think I will use it as an excuse to hang out there all day .  Maybe I will get some more auctions started on e-Bay. I have a bunch ending tomorrow night and I like to have them overlap by a bit. Here is a link in case anyone is interested in some vintage sewing machine stuff:

http://shop.ebay.com/merchant/sweigak

Hope your area of the country is warmer than mine! Stay safe out there.

A few days I wrote about a piece I was working on. I had pieced strips that I intended to recut for another ladder quilt but I liked the stripped pieces so much that I didn’t know if I should continue with the original plan or not! After several days of these bits up on the design board, I decided to put this together without recutting. I rearranged a bit and decided to set in a corner to make it all fit. I think it also made it more interesting. Here is the top:

I did a bit of machine quilting practice and felt that I had to make something usable out of my practice piece so I made this little bag today. It is about 9 inches long and maybe 4 inches wide. I don’t know what I will do with it though.

I also machine quilted a top that I posted a few days ago. I hate the way it turned out! What was I thinking??? I used a light to dark gray varigated thread. I did a terrible job here and I do not like the way I decided to quilt this. I am NOT picking this all out. Trying to figure out what I could do to redeem this ugly thing!

Any ideas?

Back to cleaning out the sewing room and listing some more vintage items on eBay. See my link on the side if you are interested. Have a great weekend everyone!