August 4, 2011
by Kathleen
10 Comments
As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve been away from this blog for a while. I have a job that sort of takes over my life during our busy season every year, which lasts from around March through the beginning of July. Working 50 hours a week, plus 10 hours a week commute time doesn’t leave me a whole lot of creative energy in my off hours. I hate that it sounds like an excuse, but it’s the truth.
I was finally able to take a vacation (or rather a stay-cation, since we didn’t actually go anywhere) to rest, revive and reclaim my life and creativity. It was a wonderful two and a half weeks, and now I’m back to work. I was able to reflect on my art, and this blog and where I would like to take both.
First, my art. I love to sew and I love that this blog reflects that, but I also am a watercolor and mixed media artist. I have discovered the fun of art quilting and art journaling. I long to mix it all up and see what happens. I still remain committed to using recycled fabrics however and wherever I can.
This blog is a place that I hope to share my experiments, my discoveries, and some tutorials. It’s also a place where I will be sharing my process of learning to trust my inner crazy wild goddess artist and allow her to grow and flourish out in the open when so often she wants to hide away afraid that she isn’t good enough.
I really hope that this will be interesting to someone besides me! LOL. Be patient with me, dear reader, for blogging is a skill I am still learning. Any comments or suggestions on how I can improve in this area are very welcome!
So, in that spirit, I will share with you a project I worked on during my vacation. I LOVE the magazine Cloth, Paper Scissors. Recently I purchased one of their e-books entitled ”10 Pet Projects: Fabric Art to Make for and About Animals”. One of the projects that they featured was creating a portrait of your pet using fabric collage, and free-motion stitching to create an art quilt. I decided to take this photo of two of my beloved kitties and try my hand at the project.

And it was a little challenging (less so when I figured out how to lower the feed dogs on my sewing machine to allow me to free-motion stitch), but so much fun. I am really happy with the way it turned out, and it will find a home hanging in our dining room.

Here’s a close-up.

Has anybody out there done any free-motion stitching on a quilt or art quilt? I think I read about a special free-motion foot you use for this purpose, but it seemed to work just fine for me with just my regular machine foot. Can anyone enlighten me?