Buzzing Around my Sewing Room
Many people like to call the space where they sew a ‘STUDIO’. Perhaps I should. That word imples things that emerge are top quality masterpieces.
I certainly cannot claim that–and so my workspace is just my room.
I have fabric, paper, paints in there. It has three walls of windows on which I can survey the doings of the neighborhood—and on occasion see that Toby has somehow breached the fence. She doesn’t do that much anymore–although if she had a mind to do so, she is a digging machine.
Several days ago, I showed my finished piece for a Mancuso quilt show featuring music–and my piece was ‘flight of the bumblebee’.
My original thought for this blog was to show my process along with tidbits of things I found interesting.
Here are some of my steps in creating that piece.
After deciding on the music—that didn’t take long–nor did finding the music and filling out the required form.
I have lots of photographs of bees, bee journals, and even bee coasters. The size of the completed piece was set and so I needed to scale up the bees to fit.
I use freezer paper as my sketching paper as I can then cut them apart to use as templates in creating the bees.
I had made the flowers in a English Paper piecing method and sewn them on the background.
The edges are completely finished, bound and just waiting for the bees to be sewn on before attaching the sleeve for hanging. I used a commercial set of templates to cut those hexagon flowers and they are machine stitched onto the background.
Then I placed the bees.
Notice the bees do not have antennae, the wings have no markings but some of the flowers have stamens.
Hand embroidery and adding buttons finished the top.
For smallish pieces and even some larger ones meant to hand on a rod, I add a small enclosed sleeve at the bottom with some washers sewn in, This gives weight to the bottom–similar to curtain chains.
And just because it was a few days ago i showed the finished piece, here it is again.
Sylvia Weir Art 