Welcome to another Thank Goodness It's Finished Friday party 😊 I'm playing catch-up today and posting a quilt top that was finished back in April, but I hadn't taken pictures to be able to share it until now.
I combined a few different inspirations together to create this design:
1. People make art with actual sea glass, gluing the pieces to canvas or paper to create images, sometimes with the addition of painted or drawn lines. Scroll through this Pinterest search to see examples.
2. Ali of Exhausted Octopus makes beautiful sea glass quilts and teaches her method in a class (which I've never taken, so I'm not sure if my method is the same as hers). Her sea glass quilts tend to have a colour-wash effect and don't form an image.
3. The ticker tape-style quilts I've made in the past, like my Ticker Tape Heart Rainbow, creating a shape with square, rectangular, and triangular pieces of fabric.
Put all that together, shake it up a bit, add some hand embroidery, and you get my Sea Glass Star mini quilt.
I have a whole series of sea glass art mini quilts vying for attention in my head. They've been gathering for years while I worked on other things and I'm so happy I finally made the first one. I'm working on another one now for an event in the fall, and I'm really looking forward to sharing that when the time comes.
Believe it or not, I wasn't aiming for my Sea Glass Star to be blue. I tried about a dozen colour combinations in EQ8, but nothing really grabbed me until I tried the light, medium, and dark blues. That immediately had me nodding my head and pulling my blue scrap basket off the shelf. I shouldn't be surprised, since I really love my blues, but I swear I tried to use other colours!
I was happy to see I did have light, medium, and dark blue Aurifil 12 wt thread in my stash. I used 2720, 2735, and 2784 to embroider a simple backstitch to outline the sections of the star.
I ended up doing most of the embroidery while we were on the road, some of it while going to a surprise birthday party for my in-laws, who both turned 80 this spring, and some while going to move Zach out of his dorm room. I wasn't sure embroidery would work well as an on-the-road project, especially considering the dismal state of our roads, but it was perfect.
Cutting the sea glass pieces was like doing a meditative puzzle. I worked on one section at a time, leaving the paper backing on the pieces until I had them all puzzled together to fill the section.
I used Lite Steam-a-Seam 2 for the fusible, which is slightly tacky, so after I peeled the paper backing off I finger pressed the pieces onto the background and that held them in place temporarily. Once all the pieces in the section were ready, I fused them down with my Oliso project iron.
For the medium and dark fabrics, I tried not to repeat a fabric in a section, but most of the fabrics are used in multiple sections. It was fun to use some of my really small scraps! My pieces range from ½" square(ish) to about 1" square(ish) and 1" x 1 ½" rectangle(ish). The fun thing about making fabric sea glass is there's no wrong shape since real sea glass comes in every possible shape.
I've made a few blue quilts lately, though they haven't all made to it the blog yet, and my blue scrap basket is still overflowing. I guess I need to keep making blue quilts!
I'm looking forward to eventually quilting my Sea Glass Star. The question now is, when will I take the time to do that instead of chasing after the next shiny new project?
I really like where you took the sea glass idea! Looks great and like it was a lot of fun to work on.
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