Growing up in the late 60s and 70s I was a little bit on the hippy side. I loved my moccasins that just had leather for the soles. I loved my hip hugger bell bottom blue jeans that I had embroidered all up the legs and had patches of fabric covering the thread bare butt. I sewed even back then. I was always drawing and painting. My parents were very supportive and even allowed me to paint on my walls. When I turned 16 I drove an old VW bug painted orange. It was a stick shift with no heat. I scraped the ice off the inside of the windows while I was driving.
I'm always trying to learn new things. I got a set of couching feet for my longarm for Christmas one year. It was six months before I tried couching. It was so much fun watching the yarn feed through the foot as I quilted. I loved it! I was hooked and needed to think of an art quilt I could make. I decided I wanted to make some funky hippy looking flowers and make the piece 3D. I would lay in bed thinking how I wanted to start it. I thought if I couch yarn directly onto my fabric what if I didn't like the layout. Picking out all those stitches wouldn't be fun. Bethanne Nemesh has a way to make applique couched pieces. If they were appliques I could move them around and even overlap pieces until they were just where I wanted them. Sewing them onto my already quilted background would be easy enough. That was a much better option than having to rip stitches out. This is an applique flower drying on my deck.
The next few blogs will be a continuation of the process of this art quilt.
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