Meet Candy!

A guest post for you! I totally admire Candy's sense of color and style, and wanted you all to meet her - enjoy!

ETA: And the winner is -- Mombrose aka Heather!

Amazing art! So beautiful! :) I love the Ocean Surf Scarf colors! :D They are all so beautiful but my closet is fairly monotone in the blue family :D!

You should have an email from me - Congratulations!!

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Hi There! My name is Candy, an art quilter working exclusively with my own hand dyed fabrics – they’re “Candied Fabric”! Amy’s asked me to tell you folks a little bit about what I do, and I’m honored to share a bit of my process with you.

With the roots of a traditional quilter, I LOVE taking smaller units and composing them into larger pieces. What I’m enjoying most these days is making small quilts that can be arranged and rearranged for display, rather than having to commit to just one arrangement and sewing them into one large unit! (You know - that stage where you’ve got the blocks on the working wall and you keep rearranging them ‘til you go insane?)

My latest series is inspired by the work of the awesome Skinny LaMinx, whose 2 color silkscreen designs often feature a sketch on a large, irregular patch of color. I had a lot of fun picking 2 different palettes of colors to work with (the “Jewel Tones” and the “Warm Colors”), then cutting nicely irregular patches from pre-fused fabric and ironing them onto a backing fabric. I then centered these over 6" x 8" layers of batting then peltex (used to stiffen baseball cap brims). I wrap the background fabric around to the back and carefully fuse it to the back. The peltex adds a bit more definition to the quilting, and makes the quilts stiff enough to stand propped up anywhere, and hang nice and flat.

Then comes the funnest part (is funnest a word? Spell check says NO! but I say YES!), the sketching! I free motion quilt a botanical motif on the quilt, going over the quilting 2-3 times, purposefully trying NOT to follow the lines – this gives me a nice bold line that emphasizes the fact that this indeed is a sketch done by hand, even though a mechanical tool was used. Here are videos of me doing 2 of them (apologies for the random sounds, on my LONG list of things to do is to learn how to set music to a video…)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7A-P_0eZAM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K93h7cClcbE

I had these playing in my booth at one of the art shows I did this Fall, and the videos got lots of attention. Here are answers to some frequent questions I got:

1. The speed of the video is not altered, it’s in real time.

2. There is nothing sketched on the fabric, I lower the feed dogs, decide what I want to sketch and go!

3. Practice Practice Practice! ;-) I’ve been doing free motion quilting for 15 years. Harriet Hargrave’s book got me started; a weekend with Melody Johnson at QSDS 11 years ago set me free.

4. A Juki TL-98 Q. It has a bit more space under the arm than regular home machines and is super fast, but it’s a pretty simple, straightforward machine.

After the quilting is done, a layer of fabric on the back covers it up, I then stitch on a hanging loop. And then the fun begins, playing around with arranging them. Although they could be hung directly on the wall in a grouping or individually, I had envisioned them hung on a mini clothesline, and luckily, I love the execution as much as I had imagined it.

As this is the giving season, I’d love to share some Candied Fabrics with you. Go take a look at all the different palettes I use for dyeing my scarves and pick your favorite one. Come back here and let me know and you could be the lucky person to win either a Habotai scarf or ½ yard of fabric custom dyed by ME for YOU!

It’s been fun sharing my sketches with you, feel free to drop by and visit my sweet spot on the internet when you have a free moment!

**Amy again - you have a week to leave a comment to win a beautiful scarf - I will select a winner December 17!

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