Red Hot Chili Peppers!

"Chili Pepper" by Christina Fairley Erickson
Freehand machine embroidery with decorative stitching and freemotion quilting

Make sure to check out the start of my Design Wall Weekends Blog Link Party coming Saturday April 6!

Well, I finally finished up my final 5 x 7" block for the Salsa Quilt.  I had some fun with this and will be posting a couple of tutorials later this week for both how to do unusual lettering and a new freemotion quilting design.  I also will work on documenting my process for installing new fonts onto your computer, so you can play around with different lettering styles like this "Taco Modern" font I use in each of my salsa blocks.

I've been super busy this last week catching up after being gone for 5 days in the "Experimental Hand Stitch class."  I've been working on continuing to complete my hand-stitch samples, which are quite relaxing to do.  I've also started cutting and piecing a new practice quilt, which I'm doing along with Leah Day's Craftsy class.  Although I'm pretty comfortable with freemotion machine quilting, the more you practice, the better you get.  The one thing I haven't completely decided upon is whether I'm going to do all the fillers which Leah suggests in her class, or whether I'll pick and choose those which I want to do.  I'm not 100% thrilled with every design she's picked, so I may just substitute some of my own, or others I've learned from Leah's blog.

One thing that's going to be a little different in the future is that I will be hosting a "Design Wall Weekend" blog linking party.  This will be open to quilters, fiber artists, mixed media artists, and book/art journalists who have blogs to help increase exposure to all sorts of great ideas.

Now, it's on to do the sashing and binding for this quilt.  Not to mention, I will need to get going on a new 5 x 7 Challenge piece for next week!  So check back for tutorials later this week and I hope you will have some fun quilting this week.

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"Corn" by Christina Fairley Erickson
Machine Freehand Embroidery, decorative stitching, freemotion quilting

Red!  Thanks for all the comments, encouragement and opinions on the background for my corn piece.  The little ends of the corn husk were challenging to applique down, but you can see a bit of the organza husk standing up in the picture.  What you can't really tell from the photo is how much the trapunto stands out.  The two longer corn rows have 5 extra layers of batting, making them stand about 3/4" up from the backing. I cut each of the batting layers a little smaller than the last, so it really has a rounded look.  The lower ear of corn has less trapunto (3 layers), since it is behind the others.


I'm now working on my last piece, chili peppers.  I started with the green stems, then went on to the darker shadowed portions of the chili.

The difficult part of these is that they are so thin, it will be difficult to convey a 3-D effect or to trapunto them.  So I tried to sew both in the long/horizontal direction and also around the width of each chili, to convey the roundness of each.

One of the main things when doing thread painting is to keep on layering your colors to add more dimension and gradation.  If you just fill in one color butted up to the next, it will look flat and like a paint-by-number painting.  Blending the colors is very important.  Also, look for the unexpected colors.  In this chili, I found a small place where the shadow had just a touch of lavender... it adds a lot to the finished piece to have those little bits that your eye might not originally catch.

Finished "Chili" thread painting

Now I just need to do the background and then I'll be on to putting all 9 of my Salsa blocks together!

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