Gone to the Dogs...

Here's the end result of my projects made from quilter Pauline Salzman's pattern and instructions. She taught a class at our guild which I unfortunately missed due to illness. But she was kind enough to provide the materials for me to give it a try on my own. Pauline is known for her whimsical pet quilts, and bases many designs on her Weimaraner dogs. Our rescue dog Scooter resembles the breed in head shape, so my project became a portrait of him. The link above is for some Pinterest images of Pauline's quilts. With the pattern, she also sent one of her wonderful postcards, shown below.

 The post card is shaded with some fabric markers. Mighty cute!

 For this project, I decided to do some free-motion machine quilting. I'd discovered InvisaFil thread at a quilt show, and was interested in trying it. The thread is very fine and blendable. Rather like monofilament, but not stiff and pokey like the nylon can be. It's described as "cottonized polysester". It's so fine, that it did require some special handling to use it successfully in my machine. So I placed the thread spool in a cup behind the machine as it wanted to spill off the spool pin on the machine. Then to achieve the proper tension, I rigged up the pink straw section you see on top on the machine above. It's taped in place and the thread runs through it just to give it a bit more tension and guidance than the regular thread guides offered. Once that was done, I was ready to proceed. You can barely see the thread coming through the straw- that' how fine it is.

So I stitch-doodled and stippled my way around the dog image. And I really like how the thread looks. It made my free-motion quilting look "not half-bad", as the saying goes.

I've been away from my blog for some time as we've also been away from home. We traveled to Phoenix, Sedona, Prescott, and Wickenburg, Arizona. A lovely trip with wonderful sights. In Scottsdale arts district I happened onto this cactus sculpture covered with found objects.

And we stayed for a couple of nights in the beautiful red rock area of Sedona. These photos were taken from the balcony just outside our hotel room door. Because the sun hits the rocks at different angles throughout the day, the rocks are constantly changing. These shots were late afternoon. Such a beautiful area.