Little Shirts

Earlier this year I attended a quilt show in Orlando, Florida.  I love looking at all of the quilts and seeing what great ideas quilt artist from all over the world have incorporated into their works of art.  Yes, I do believe quilt makers are artist. 

I love looking for inspiration and ideas to enhance my own art work.  At this quilt show one quilt in particular caught my attention.  I took a quick picture and once I got home I looked up the artist, Gillian Travis to see what her story was.  Well she does beautiful things and I found her website full of inspiration.  This is the quilt that was displayed at the show that caught my eye.

When looked at very carefully you can see that she has 'stamped' a design on the background fabric, which is wool felt.  Wool felt was a very good choice for this type of quilt. Felt is an easy textile to 'rubber stamp' an image on.  Each one of those little sweaters are hand embroidered. I really love the idea of the embroidered sweaters, but if I ever do anything like them they will be done on the embroidery machine!  If you are interested in looking at any of her other art work you can look at her website. http://gilliantravis.co.uk/ 

I am filing the rubber stamping on felt idea in my head for future use.  I do love a rubber stamp and I have collected many over the years.  I like finding new ways to use them.

I showed you this quilt so that you could see where I got my inspiration for the little quilt I am currently working on.  I must warn you, I love this embroidery machine applique that Chantell digitized for me so much that it will be showing up in a lot of my quilts.  If you are interested in the design, you can purchase it from Chantell's website.  I will warn you, she is in the middle of cleaning up and moving her website so it might be a little messy, but if you click on Quilts and applique on the left hand menu, it takes you right to the page they are on.

If you look closely you can see that the collar and the pocket are '3D'.  I hand sewed on the little buttons on these bigger shirts.   There are 9 of these that I stitched in the 8x8 sized hoop and I am making a little wall hanging out of them.  I will post a picture when I finish.

On these smaller shirts (which fits in the 5x5 hoop) the buttons are part of the applique design so the embroidery machine stitched them.  You can also leave off the buttons if you wish. 

And yes, if you think about it, these would look really good in that Hoffman challenge fabric!  Hmmmmmm 😻