Swirly Do Session 1: Introduction

So welcome to my fantasy world of Swirly-Do Trees. I think you're gonna have so much fun doing this. It's one of the few things that I've ever done that I find completely whimsical, and I'm not necessarily a whimsical kind of gal, but this whole thing is very fun to do. There's no right or wrong. There's just, you know, kind of going through the motions of creating, which is very fun. This is a traditional quilt, and so you're gonna see your quilting on the backside, just like you see the quilting on the backside here. It has a top layer, a batting layer, and a backing, and we work in kind of an unusual way in that we build our trunk first, like you see in this piece right here. And then from the trunk, we build up and extend branches into stems. Then once that is done, before we put on any of the tiny stems, we go in and quilt the background, and then go in and add all the tiny stems and all of the roots. Then once that's done, we come back in and we use twists of fabric. So we take long pieces of fabric, and we twist it up really tight, and then we put those into swirls and stitch them down free motion. It's just really cool. It's really fun. We can have loose, open swirls, more like this, we can have tight, close swirls, more like this. Some look like the leaves haven't unfurled, and the others are unfurling, even though they're nothing like leaves. But they seem to work. Maybe I should have called it like a lollipop tree or something. I don't know. But it's just a lot of fun. I have actually made a rug that sits in front of my sink in my kitchen from these tight swirls. So I put together the same fabric base, but I used canvas, and the swirls are all nestled right into each other, and it's about three feet by two feet, and it is fabulous. I throw it in a washer and dryer at least once a week, and it just keeps, you know, working. So these swirls, you can do a lot of things with them. The trunk is probably the only area that you might run into problems. So I want to talk a little bit about the fabric for it. In this sample I used cheesecloth. So this is cheesecloth, whereas in this sample right here, I used what's called monk's cloth, and it is just like a very loosely-woven, almost a linen feel, but it's just really cheap, and it's what monks make their clothing out of. It's very cheap, 'cause that's what a monk would do. What we want is just something that has a very loose weave that we can manipulate very easily. This might be harder for you to find. This will be easy for you to find, but you're gonna find it in white, and most of us don't want a white trunk unless we're gonna make aspens, and aspens may not look like aspen trees if they have swirly-dos on the top. So the way I dye this is to paint it, and there's a wonderful paint called Dye-Na-Flow, has the word dye in the beginning, but it's paint that acts like dye. It's made by Jacquard. It can be purchased at any fine art supply store, and most fabric stores these days. If you can't find it, get any brown fabric paint and thin it out so that it's very loose, almost as loose as water. Dip your cheesecloth down in it, make sure it gets all saturated, wring it out really well, lay it flat to dry, and you've got brown cheesecloth. Cheesecloth can be bought at the big box fabric stores. It's in the notions department, usually in a package, but sometimes it's on a bolt too. It's very, very useful, and in itself can also be twisted and swirled and all sorts of wonderful fun things done with it. But cheesecloth is a very valuable tool in your sewing closet that you probably don't have and probably could really use. So let's go ahead and get started and build our trunk.