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Beading the Sun

July 4, 2021 4 Comments

Happy Independence Day! With all the recent days of sunshine and heat, I thought it was a great time to tell you about my most recent project. It came to be with inspiration from three different directions.

I received a comment from Karen to a recent post about my mailing tape beading technique (click here to link to that post):

“Let us know when you will be teaching another class in adding beads to a quilt.  I have tons of beads and need some ideas on how to use them on a quilt.”

This got me to thinking that I haven’t done any beading classes for a long time. Then the ThreadBenders group chose a small challenge theme of “Sun”. This challenge had very few rules – “make a quilt with a sun on it” 🌞 . On top of that I was excited about the wonderful way Clara embellished a wall hanging with fasteners (click here to read it). This all came together in my brain and I jumped right in to my beaded sun quilt.

So where did I begin? Well – I needed to have a base for my beading and it needed to contain the sun. I chose a wonderful, bright hand-dyed fabric for the sun and a beautiful blue hand-dyed fabric for the sky. These were fat quarters from my stash and the colors alone made me want to continue. I drew an appropriately sized 1/4 sun (it seemed to fit best) on a piece of freezer paper, cut it out, ironed the shiny side to the sun fabric, and layered it with the sky. Then I stitched along the outside of the paper, through both layers.

all the way around.

The paper was peeled away and the excess sun fabric was trimmed next to the stitching, ala my raw-edged Repliqué technique.

Leaving me a wonderful top to embellish.

I trimmed the sky fabric away from behind the sun to reduce bulk (and who would want to waste any of that beautiful fabric?)

During this entire process I was contemplating where and how to embellish. Stay tuned to next week’s post to see where I went from there!

Related Posts

  • Sun Embellishing – Part 2
  • Sun Embellishing – Part 1
  • A Time Saving Machine

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Jodi Grzeczka says

    July 4, 2021 at 11:57 am

    Happy 4th, Chris! OMG! I am itching to make a sun quilt now!! Love your fabrics!

    Reply
  2. Shasta says

    July 5, 2021 at 1:43 pm

    Looks great! I look forward to seeing how you embellish it.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Sun Embellishing – Part 1 says:
    July 11, 2021 at 8:11 am

    […] I decided to back my piece with wool batting (if you missed last week’s intro to this topic click here). In this way I’m able to hide my knots in the batting and have a more substantial surface to […]

    Reply
  2. A Bright Collection of Art Quilts says:
    January 23, 2022 at 2:55 pm

    […] time and I had so much fun stitching and beading it that I did a three episode post at these links: Sun 1, Sun 2, Sun 3 (I apologize for being a bit repetitive to those of you who have read all the posts […]

    Reply

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