Monday, January 8, 2018

Class quilt from Katie Pasquini Masopust

I've been wanting to take a class from Katie Pasquini Masopust for a long time.  I've admired all of her work in all of the stages and have looked at the Alegre Retreats for quite a while.  Well, I didn't sign up for the travel trip, but our quilt guild did hire her to come for a lecture and class.  So, it was with great pleasure that I got a spot in the class.

She taught us her ghost layers and color wash technique and we had a fabulous time with her for 2 days.  I did the class exercise the first day and worked off my picture for a larger, more personal, and more difficult quilt to make later.  Here is the piece I started in the class.  It is an abstract free style piece. After all of the pieces were quickly fused to a foundation layer, I zig zagged around all of the edges and tore out the foundation.



At that point, I decided I wanted to make it into another powerline quilt to keep making pieces that fit into my series.  However, I not only thought that my class sample was a little sloppy (as they tend to be), but that it was too dark at the bottom and didn't have any character.  So I pulled out a bunch of threads, yarn, llama fleece, and fabric (that I made from thread and yarn) and piled it on top of the quilt.



Then it all got covered with a white heavy body tulle (from the inside of a bride's dress) and quilted all over in light pink thread.  I feel like the toning down of the bright colors made this piece more unified and less jarring.  Normally, I prefer bold colors, how about you?


It was then slashed and trimmed to allow for the burgundy inserts for the power pole.  I would have put the pole at a slightly different angle, but I wanted to cover up the strong diagonal line that I had in the piece, which felt like it was cutting the design in half.   Now it looked more like an abstract landscape than just a jumble of shapes.  On pieces like this, I think you should analyze each step and not be afraid to change directions.


The final step was to quilt it with straight lines in both burgundy and pink threads to mimic power lines.  I decided to bind this quilt, as it was fairly thick with all the layers and I knew it would be too hard to turn and double the thickness with a facing finish.

Anyway, here is the final quilt.  It's 18" x 18".

Powerline #7 - Pasquini's Pole by Joanne Adams Roth 2017


I hope you like it!

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