Friday, December 28, 2012

Sewing On Air Art Quilting Technique. . .

On Wednesday, we held our monthly art quilt workshop.  This month's technique was "Sewing On Air" by Nancy Green as featured in the October/November 2012 issue of "Quilting Arts Magazine."
Following along with the instructions, this is my quilt base.  I fused fabric to fabric using Mistyfuse, and layering front and back right sides together with fusible batting.  I then used the no binding technique I described here.  Once layered and with the fabric turned inside out, the piece was quilted.
The circles were left unquilted as my sewing on air will be done within one of the circles.
The center of the circle was cut out.
The circle is then heavily zigzag stitched.  Heavily means going around the circle four times with a free-motion zigzag stitch (my favorite :). 
The fun begins as the needle is placed to the back of the circle and straight-stitched across its diameter at a medium speed.  Once across, the fabric was turned 180 degrees and gone across again.  I did this three times, always with free-motion stitching.  The three lines of sewing were then zigzagged over with my machine set at 2.5 width.  And, whalaa, there is a strong cord-like thread line running through my circle.
This was an easy technique, much more so than I realized it would be.  If you would like to try this technique, let me give you a few hints that were learned in the workshop.  First, the magazine technique does not require a stabilizer for the stitching.  However, I used fusible web,  fusible batting, lots of quilting, and heavy stitching around the perimeter of the circle which all acted as a stabilizer for the stitching across the diameter of the hole.  I also noticed that the smaller size of my hole seemed to matter in being able to keep its shape compared to larger holes done by others.

If you do give this a try, please let me know of any tips or hints you find to be helpful.

Until next time,



1 comment:

Rossy said...

Dear Karri
first Happy New Year for you and your family.
We make holidays in Austria and I must make so much sport :) i Miss my sewing maschine so much.
This its a great technique, I like it very much.I ask me How do you sew in the middel from the hole?
So I wish you a very beatiful happy new Year.....
Hugs from Austria
rossy