Postby Harriet » Mon Jan 14, 2013 8:27 am
I agree with Harmony on thread for hand quilting, Ivy. Unless it is a small, small project that will only be decorative, I would use thread marked for the purpose, "Hand Quilting", which would be carried at almost any cloth store. However, remember that if you are machine quilting you don't use hand quilting thread because it is coated and not meant to go through the mechanism of a machine. There are a lot of threads that are good for machine quilting, and I think Dual Duty would be okay. I have quilts for which I used Dual Duty for both the piecing and the machine quilting and they turned out fine.
I meant to get back and say thanks so much for the comments on the photo of dd's painting, Nancy, BookSaver and Harmony! She has only been experimenting with color in her art a short time, but sketching daily for years. She had been taking more and more time and getting very precise, and there was impact, but she felt the sketches didn't hold people's attention. I told her, naturally the eye looks for color, and she admitted she didn't think she could win competitions without it, when other mediums would catch the eye and leave her sketches behind. I had to really lobby even for watercolor though, telling her to think of it as just a "wash" of color, nothing too hard to commit to, but now she seems to enjoy having a more abstract element to "lay over" precise sketches. Interestingly, I think the magic words were when I told her her dear great aunt (my mother's twin, whom dd loved) enjoyed watercolor and kept an easel set up.
I have a photo of the Zentangle bookmarks we did for her teacher's gifts - maybe I can post that, too. BookSaver, I don't think I'd ever heard of Zentangle until the teacher you talked about here, who used the ideas in fabric art. But after I looked it up on the net and learned about it, I ended up giving books on it as 2 Christmas gifts - a preteen girl's and a "secret Santa" gift.