Sewing With Nancy

Two of my favorite hobbies are sewing and gardening. Almost 20 years ago, I was introduced to a quilting technique that combined both avocations. Please welcome Natalie Sewell, a good friend and almost the nationally known landscape quilting artist. Natalie, we've done programs before on landscape quilting, but this time, we're really going down to the very basics, the simplest of all. Right. Absolutely. We're just doing the beginning elements of landscape quilting. And a great place to start is with a close-up garden scene. My design "Summer Flowers" is what we'll use as an example on how to choose fabric, messy and fussy cut, as well as design with raw-edge applique. "Beginning Landscape Quilting." That's what's next on Sewing with Nancy. Sewing with Nancy, TV's longest-airing sewing and quilting program with Nancy Zieman, is made possible by Baby Lock, a complete line of sewing, quilting, and embroidery machines and sergers. Baby Lock, for the love of sewing. Madeira, specializing in embroidery, quilting, and special-effect threads. Because creativity is never black and white. Koala Studios, fine sewing furniture custom-built in America. Clover, making a difference in sewing, quilting, crafting, and needle arts for over 30 years. Amazing Designs and Klass Needles. When you're beginning your landscape quilting journey, choosing fabrics or knowing how to choose fabrics sometimes is-- can be a stumbling block. We'd like to share with you how we approach that attempt but also how we work with a pattern or an inspirational photo. That's right, Nancy. The photo seemed to me just ideal for teaching beginning landscape quilting. It had no color, however. And the background was just mottled. Just mottled, yes. So, when you look at this finished quilt with the background fabric-- it's a hand-dyed fabric-- Right. And if you missed our first episode, you can go to

www.nancyzieman.com

and watch it online to see a little bit more information on fabrics we use, but you can buy it hand-dyed, or commercial batiks would work, too, just so they're mottled and they have some... Give a shape of-- A variety of shades, yeah. Shades and a little bit of color. So we have our fabric placed on our background. But then as far as choosing leaf fabrics or foliage fabrics, ground cover, you have an assortment there, Natalie. I do, and these are very easy to find in fabric stores. And the more the merrier, because all greens seem to go together in nature. Mm-hmm. So, we've got a collection here that we've cut out. Messy cutting. And messy cutting-- if you haven't tried messy cutting before, watch the pro cut fabric poorly. Yes. You have to be really messy with it. That's why we call it "messy cutting." And so what I'm gonna do is just cut very badly and try not to look where I'm going. And then you get something that looks like a shrub. And this shape doesn't have any lollipop or ice-cream cone shapes. Right. You want it irregular. Yeah, there's nothing really round in foliage. And Natalie has pre-cut some of the fabrics, as you can see, that we have scattered here. And we also have some pre-cut fabrics for the flowers. I wanted to show you the floral fabrics that we have. You don't need a lot of yardage for this. You just need a small amount just to messy-cut out some sections. And in this floral print, we have some really big ones, but then the little itty-bitty areas are what we used for some ground cover, just a hint of fabric. As you get used to looking at fabrics, you get used to looking for little tiny details like that. Now, glue stick is the key you're going to use to put on the back of your fabric. Fabric-- not a paper glue stick, not a fabric glue stick. Paper. And roughly add a little glue stick just to temporarily hold it in place. It will not gum up your needle. Trust me. Yes. And Natalie's going to glue one piece and put it up, and then we're going to create the scene. And go ahead, Natalie. Let me show you how we glue. It's just simply opening the tube and sticking the glue. This is just, as Nancy said, just a temporary measure. And that's enough to start your scene. And now we're going together-- we're going to build this foliage, this ground cover. And I'm gonna take some of these pieces. You really can't go wrong with putting the fabric-- or cutting the fabric, because if it looks poorly, it's probably what you want. Yeah. And you can see that messing it up by putting foliage-- trying not to make it a nice arrangement but very irregular...pattern. If you just had one-- one fabric, it would be flat. It wouldn't have dimension. So that's why we try to choose fabrics that have kind of the same scale, the same size leaves so that they look proportionate for the design. And share with some friends. They may have some fabrics in their fabric stash that look appropriate. And I'm just gonna... The other-- the other wonderful thing about this is how little fabric you really need for landscape quilting. Now, some of our flowers are just going to be tucked in here, because in many flower gardens, you don't-- you have more foliage than you have flowers. Yes. And these are our only fussy cut leaves here, and... these were cut out of this fabric, and they will go... here. So, this is these tall flowers. And this is not botanically correct. We don't really know what these are, but they look right, don't they, Natalie? They look right to me. And we don't worry about accuracy in botanical terms. Now, this would all be glued down, but you can start to see how the depth of the fabric, by layering it, creates interesting designs and a great beginner project. Now, Natalie, you've created another scene called "The Meadow." The meadow, this time, has a blue background. Right. More like sky. And the flowers are big. The whole scale is quite different. Notice, though, that the foliage is the same foliage that we're using here but using it in a big form. A larger scale. The poppies are kind of fun to work with. Right. And then I made a scene called "Irises in My Garden." Again, a little impressionistic- looking, lots of foliage. This is one of my first landscape quilts, and it-- I mean, I'd do it differently now, but it's kind of-- a great beginner project. It's a great beginning quilt. So, as you're working on this at home, after you've decided on your fabric, you've positioned it down, then you just glue it into place. Glue it down. We'll show you in our 3rd program of this series how to baste and how to do the quilting and putting it together. But a garden scene-- a great place for beginner landscape quilters to get their feet wet. I'm certain your eye focuses on the dancing maple in Natalie's quilt by the same name. The lively and spirited tree is the star of the design. Yet without the interesting ground cover, the depth and dimension in the quilt would not be as impactful. If your inspiration photo features ground cover, we'd like to share with you the tricks of choosing fabric and designing that all-important landscape quilt element. Well, here's the quilt in its glory and fun part of it. And, Natalie, you had an inspiration for this quilt. Yes, I did. It was a tree near my house in full color in the early fall-- a Japanese maple. And it was photographed just with a cement driveway. Mm-hmm. So, we took liberties, and I just created a new dimension. We don't let the photo be the boss of us. It's the inspiration, as we referenced that. In the first program of the series, we talked about trees. So you can reference that again, to watch that again how that's working out. But beginner quilters often have a difficult time choosing fabrics for the ground cover. Right. Ground cover is very intimidating when you're first beginning. So, I like to remind quilters that you can't really use too many pieces of ground cover. The important thing, however, is scale. And you need to make sure that the scale-- you don't want huge leaves. Mm-hmm. You want the leaves to be comparable in ground cover. And so, we've just given you an example of four fabrics that really work well as ground cover. Now, as we kind of move up the quilt, we'll talk about trees a little bit later, but look at the scale of the leaves in the trees. I mean, obviously, distant ground cover, you see the leaves. It's scale that's important. And you may need a lot of fabrics. We give you permission to buy a lot of fabrics, but you don't need a lot of yardage of each. No. Really 1/2 yard of each fabric would be more than enough for many quilts. So, we have the trees glued to the background fabric. And we'd like to share with you after messy-cutting the edges-- now, you'd glue each piece. And we're just gonna save some time, but to give the depth, we're gonna put this-- Natalie, I hope these stick up here long enough for us to show-- Yes, they will. And you can see how we've kind of... hiding some of those fabrics. There we go. And if you just use one fabric, it's gonna be flat. It's 2-dimensional, but Natalie's achieving great depth by the fussy cutting, and we're dropping leaves on the floor, our ground cover.

laughter

But let's look at, yeah, great, how that does some shaping. And the different colors give the shadow effect. Whoop! That one truly needs to be glued down. Let's try a pin for now. And just notice how it's shaped. But in the quilt, we have the red leaves, which we'll talk about in a minute, but in that ground cover, Natalie, you have some highlights. I do. I thought, "Well, if it's a red maple, it's gonna be losing a few leaves." Sure. So, what I did was simply take a red oil pastel and make little red marks. It's also nice to have the color red appear again in the ground cover. Now, I think we should talk about permanent markers-- you buy at office or school supply store, oil pastels where you buy at an art store. They work great for landscape quilting. They do! You don't need to go-- No. You don't need to have artist materials. Office supply stores work beautifully. We-- we... You added, Natalie, this great-looking sapling or landscape-- or Japanese maple, excuse me. And this is the fabric you chose-- Right. For the leaves. Right. We've talked a lot about messy cutting, but this had some fussy cutting in it. Right. And by fussy cutting, we mean following along the lines of the little patterns inside. You know, instead of going wiggly and messy, we're really following the lines. And, uh, it's very tedious, but if you're a quilter, tedium is good. But then to get depth, Natalie cut the leaves down to make the smaller scale so that everything wasn't the same size. And these look like they're in the distance, which is the effect I wanted. So, we're just giving you kind of tidbits, design... Design tricks. This-- when working with landscape quilting, in the 3rd program, we'll show you how to stitch these down and to do the quilting, but this is how you achieve some of the looks or pull from the inspiration that you may start with. Now, here's an inspirational photo of-- of the scene Natalie calls "Dogwood." This is the starting point, and then this is your quilt. Lovely, Natalie. Oh, thank you, Nancy. This, again-- look at the little white blossoms. Again, very tedious, but a lot of fun. And the ground cover, a variety of fabrics so that the trees are showcased in-- you don't really concentrate on it, but it makes the scene look so impressive. Right. Right. I used this inspirational photo to create my design. The trees are at a normal color. It's kind of had a lot of moss on it. So, here's my interpretation of that photograph. I call it "If Trees Were Teal." crazy colorations, but they look somewhat realistic. Oh, they look wonderful. They look wonderful. And often, trees look that way. And the ground cover, again, helps accentuate and finish the design. I'm certain by now you realize you're learning to use fabric as paint and scissors as your paintbrush to capture nature in a wall hanging. Natalie's "Autumn Birches"-- the design combines many techniques we've already explained with the exception of the background tree foliage. Next, learn the importance of the scale of fabric prints and also the importance of really bad messy cutting to give the impression of distant trees. We're having many constant themes through this program. And in this "Autumn Birch" scene, you have foreground ground cover, which we've already have in our design that you'll see. But then, also, we have worked with trees and this background foliage. It is critical that that's a technique that you learn how to create. And here's your fabric, Natalie. Yeah, these are some of the foliage fabrics that we've used. There's so many available. And so we just brought 3 here, but these-- if they're cut messy, they really work very well as distant foliage. And we talked about the importance of messy cutting. You know, the edges are really ragged. And you just move your scissors in and out. Let me do one for you. Yeah, please. And often, when I do this, sometimes I end up re-cutting just to make sure the edges are jagged enough. See how messy I'm making it? In fact, sometimes I'm actually even ripping the fabric a little bit. Now, we will be tacking this fabric down. You'll learn this in the 3rd program. We'll be doing some sewing details, but this is all on design today. Right. And we're going to put the foliage in before the trees in this case, because I've deliberately made the trees the foreground. So, we're going to just place the foliage. This is easy, easy work. And you would, of course, glue this. We're spending-- or saving a little time by just letting it be tacky right now, tacked to the background fabric. It-- foliage in the distance comes down further. We can get it up a little bit higher. And with that interesting background, that dark background now-- we didn't show this, Natalie, but I think we should take a little pause right now to show the inspiration fabric that we used-- or the inspiration photo. Right. Because you can kind of see what we just created now is in the scene. In the distance, there's very little leaves or they're mottled or you-- Yeah, they're very small. Right. And that's what we've created here. So, you're using that photo just as a guideline. Right. And we often jump off and leave the photo in the dust when we are making a quilt. Natalie has taken down the tree trunks that we've pre-cut. This is the fabric that we used, the two pieces-- the dark fabric for the very distant trees, and then there are kind of mid-range trees, and then the closest trees are made from the birch fabric, the wrong side and what normally would be the right side. Yeah, this is the right side, and this is the other right side. Yeah. So, here's... again, poorly cut trees, but they look more realistic than if you'd used a ruler. Yeah, we wouldn't want to use a rotary cutter. So, let's-- First, we'll do the shaping and show you how we like to use some trees. Now, again, we'd glue these down. I was hesitant as a beginner landscape quilter to glue. It's the only way to go about it. But for time's sake, we're not gluing. Let me tell you that Nancy pinned every single piece. Ha ha! The pins all stuck together. It didn't work. It didn't work at all. On the bottom of the tree, to make it look more realistic, you can either tuck it behind some messy-cut foliage, as I have here. Or, if you'd like, you can cut kind of a jagged... Bottom. Yeah, so that it looks a little bit more realistic. Now I'm gonna put up some birch trees... And put... some-- this is a little long, but we've cut it back. Sure, sure. So, you can see how, you know, the trees are starting to get some foliage back there. You'd need more. You'd need more foliage, but picking up some hints from our first program, we're gonna do a little shading. And with a dark marker or silver marker, you can add some shading. We detailed that a lot in that program. But you get the idea of "Wow, just with a little..." A very little goes a long way in shading. These are kind of happy trees.

both laugh

Happy little trees. Yes, they are! And even on the light tree, we want to show that it-- It's got shading, because look at how the dimension changes when you darken one edge. Now, as we-- oh, it's just amazing what shape that gives. And we look at Natalie's "Autumn Birches" and you can see the great shading. We drew in-- or Natalie drew in some distant branches and it's just charming. Now let's take a look at 2 other inspirations. First of all, we have "September." and here is the inspiration photo and then your quilt, your grand quilt. Thank you. Again, you know, this is, for quilters-- cutting out each little gold leaf was quite a challenge, but I found it fun and you will, too. I created the scene called "Horicon Marsh," modeled after a marsh near where I live. And the distant trees have many of the same fabrics I used in the foreground. But those distant trees give depth and shape. So, during the second program, we have worked with a flower bed, worked with ground cover, also tree foliage using many of the same principles-- gluing the fabric down. And next time, we'll show you some stitching techniques. Quilts serve many roles. They can keep us warm, tell stories, or they can build friendships. My "Nancy's Corner" guest is here to share the unique story of a modern-day quilting bee that brought six quilters together who learned a new technique while sharing history and the love of family. I'd like you to meet my guest Catrina. Catrina Sparkman, who's a playwright, novelist, and a quilter. Welcome, Catrina. Thank you for having me, Nancy. You have six new friends. You weren't all friends a year ago, right? No, we weren't. We knew each other from the community, but-- but no, we weren't all friends before we started. Share with our viewers the modern-day quilting bee that you started. And you had a goal after one year. Yes. Well, we decided that what we would do, we wanted to bring together artists, um... writers and artists, and we decided, "Let's make some quilts. Let's make some story quilts." And, I think 2 people in our group had actually ever quilted before. Sure. The rest were writers and various other artists in different art forms. And so we decided that we would meet once a month, we would tell our stories, and we would learn this new art form together. Well, we're gonna share with our viewers some of these stories in quilts, and yours is called "First Date." Yes. Tell us about it. Well, mine tells the story of-- it's a story that I heard growing up about my mom and dad's first date. Uh-huh. And how they come back from the movies. My dad took my mom to go see "Hang 'em High," and that's actually on that quilt. Ha ha! And he says they get back from the movies and he sees rifles everywhere. My mom's family is in the middle of-- with a feud with the family across the street, but he didn't know that. He thought maybe the rifle was for him, because he was late. Oh ho ho! But you had a happy ending. It had a very happy ending. The next quilt that we're gonna look at is called "Generations." Yes. And Edith Hilliard made the quilt. And share some of the images that are in this quilt. Well, if-- you notice on the quilt there is the continent of Africa there-- Mm-hmm. And there's Louisiana, and there's a space shuttle there. And her story tells-- her quilt tells the story of her family's migration to... to eventually to Wisconsin but to America. Mm-hmm. She talks about her ancestors who first came-- her great-great-grandfather, I believe it was who first came from Africa to Louisiana-- by way of Louisiana. Sure. And it also tells the story of her uncle, who was the first African-American... Astronaut. Astronaut, yeah, in the nation. All there in fabric for everyone to see and share. Exactly. And we have Cynthia. Your friend Cynthia Woodland made the next quilt. And that's called "Ingrafted." Yes. Inspiring. I like adoption quilts, so tell us about this. Yes. Cynthia's quilt tells the remarkable story of her own adoption and how she was adopted into a loving family and how also how her-- her, um... Her and her husband, also, they decided to adopt. And so, the beautiful thing, she made this-- this quilt for her daughter Solana Marie. And all of the women in Cynthia's family have the same middle name-- Marie. Oh, ok. And her daughter's name, the meaning of her name, is in the quilt with the rays of the sun. So, it's just a beautiful quilt. And quickly, we'll talk about "Summer Memories" and Wanda Tapp. Yes. So, Wanda's story tells-- her quilt tells the story of summer trips back home down South from the North and, um-- hot dogs. Hot dogs, pickles, picnic baskets. Oh, yes. All of the things that she loved about that as a child. These are warm stories. All in a year, these six women made six quilts and they each will be treasured for a long time. Thank you for sharing that with us, Catrina. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. I hope you've enjoyed this second program and our interview with Catrina-- our second program on beginning landscape quilting. We have one more show to do on this topic. Natalie Sewell will be back with me next time to finish up. We'll do some more designing, but also, we'll be doing the quilting and stippling part-- the part that you may not exactly know how to do. You can always go to

nancyzieman.com

and re-watch this program if you'd like. Thanks for joining me. Bye for now. Nancy and Natalie Sewell have written a "Beginning Landscape Quilting" book. It features a photo showcase of all the techniques taught in this 3-part series. The book is $14.99, plus shipping and handling. To order this book, call 1-800-336-8373 or visit our website at sewingwithnancy.com/2907. Order item number BK2907, "Beginning Landscape Quilting." Credit card orders only. To pay by check or money order, call the number on the screen for details. Visit Nancy's website at

nancyzieman.com

to see additional episodes, Nancy's blog, and more. Sewing with Nancy, TV's longest-airing sewing and quilting program with Nancy Zieman has been brought to you by Baby Lock, Madeira Threads, Koala Studios, Clover, Amazing Designs and Klass Needles. Closed captioning funding provided by Pellon. Sewing with Nancy is a co-production of Nancy Zieman Productions and Wisconsin Public Television.