This past Thursday, four fun ladies in Mukwonago completed their very first tuffets! It was rainy outside, but everything inside Quilt-agious was bright and cheery! The finished products were just beautiful! Here is everyone holding their pride and joy. Let's take a closer look at each one, shall we? I love doing this. They are all so different! The Second Sue also used drapery fringe to cover the staples and add a dramatic element. Check this out! Congratulations to all of the tuffetteers!
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Now that I've listed tuffet supplies for sale in my store, I'm trying to figure out how to get Google to recognize it better. I have words (such as "tuffet supplies") set up in my SEO field, but I show up on something like the fourth page in Google, after some of my classes! Aside from having one web page that just says "tuffet supplies" over and over again, is there something I'm missing? If anyone knows more about this, let me know!
Big news: I officially opened a store on my site! I also opened one on Etsy. In my shop here, you will find supplies for making your own tuffet! I do plan to add more items soon, including skating outfit information. It's a never-ending job! Thanks to all of my friends and my wonderful little family for their support.
My first group of students just finished their first class! They are all staff at Quilt-agious, a wonderful, bright, modern shop in Mukwonago, Wisconsin. Here are a few photos of them in action! Part of the fun of this class is working together! Danielle's tuffet is full of golden, geometric elegance. Penny is the shop owner. She chose beautiful autumn colors. Her pansy button is so pretty! Karen made her tuffet from blues and Browns. I think her button was the perfect fabric choice. And last but certainly not least, Kris made hers from brights. Again, the best button fabric! She also chose unfinished feet, which she plans to paint. I can't wait to see them! I know! They're getting out of hand! But this is another class sample. I have a few more to make and then I'll be back to quilts and costumes. This one features a lot of Moda fabrics again. But there are others thrown in there too. I love the deer button. I experimented with this faux leather fabric. This is a different style tuffet in that it does not have multiple strips; instead it has larger panels. Just prove to be challenging in that the "shoulders" don't lie as flat as I would like them to. I did do some trimming and adjusting which yielded a more rounded top than usual. I also use decorative nailhead brads on the bottom instead of the typical staples. They were challenging in their own way! I'm glad I did it, though. I learned a lot on this tuffet. I finished the rainbow tuffet. It has 64 different fabrics in it! It will hang out at the Electric Needle on Odana Rd. in Madison for a while. I'll be teaching there in July! And I love the feet. They're different from the others I've used before. I can't wait to start teaching! I do a "practice run" on the staff at Quilt-agious next week (poor, poor guinea pigs). I have three customer classes scheduled there, starting in less than two weeks! I just wanted to make a rainbow tuffet. The traditional tuffet takes 64 strips, so I decided to use 64 different pieces of fabric. There were so many strips I had to turn the corner at the bottom! This is a table runner that I made for the Minnesota Road Show several years ago. It's from a pattern called Bent Pieces from Maple Island Quilts. It features curved piecing and organic quilting. It's not a long table runner. It measures approximately 17 1/2 x 52. I hope that you can see the fabric and quilting better in this photo. As you can see above, I changed thread for the different colors. The best part? This quilt is for sale! I'm hoping to be able to set up a little shop on this site soon. I'll let you know when it's up! I made this tuffet out of Moda's Mixologie line. Right now it's renting space at Bungalow Quilting and Yarn in Ripon until I get their sample to them. I have a class scheduled there, too! The class is scheduled Thursdays, June 18 and 25, from 10 am to 2 pm. Call (902) 748-2905 to schedule! I taught a class at Quilt-agious in Mukwonago last night. It's called "Big Sky" and it's from a book by Karen Montgomery. This is one of those quilts that doesn't photograph very well. In person, the background blends together better than it seems to in the photo. This was a fun quilt to make! It uses the Scrap Crazy 6 templates by Creative Grids. They are really nice templates because they are of the same quality as the Creative Grids rulers, complete with grippy edges and dots. And what a fun group of women I got to teach! I'm really looking forward to next week! Today I met with my foam guy. I have a foam guy! It's so crazy. I also started piecing a modern tuffet from Moda Mixologie. I can't wait to put it together! Now I just need my wood guy to finish up. Whew! I'm sure learning a lot about upholstery supplies. I had no idea how many types of foam there are out there, or how many different thicknesses of upholstery batting. Not to mention the tools! I'm hoping by the end of this week, I'll have enough put together so that I can start making samples! I bought some beautiful silk/cotton fabric from India while I was at the International Quilt Festival and I can't wait to make a tuffet from it!
Anyway, I meet with my foam guy tomorrow. So far I have assembled a posse including a foam guy, a plywood guy, and my feet people. Not to mention my fellow Tuffetmasters! Or would that be Tuffetmistresses? Fooooooaaaaammmmm...... I finally made it home from the tuffet workshop in North Carolina. It was such fun and I learned so much that I felt like tuffets were falling out of my ears. But after a good night's sleep in my own bed, I'm ready to roll! Here are some highlights from the workshop! First up: my array of strips: I used a set of 2 1/2 inch strips, though if you are making them from your stash, you can get away with smaller strips. However, the convenience of using a ready-made strip roll can't be beat! Getting a good start on my tuffet top here. Several sections later and we have my tuffet top! The colors are pretty, but it looks pretty sad and droopy. However, add it to this (which we made on day two): and then we have.... almost a tuffet! Well, almost. At this point, I'd call it a pouf, but it needs to have that cute dimple to really be a tuffet. I don't have photos of me working on mine (not enough hands to hold a camera!) but I do have some of fellow tuffet affiliates. Sharyn is showing Judy how to make sure the tuffet is beautifully rounded without unsightly bumps. Here's Karena getting to know her tuffet inside and out while feeding the button cords through. And here is the adorable Marti showing the pneumatic staple gun who's boss. A few finishing steps later, add some feet and voila, we have tuffets! Lots of tuffets!
I'm on my way back home from the tuffet workshop! But of course you need some photos! We have people from Kentucky, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Nebraska, to name a few! I don't know if I left any states out. I'm sitting in West Virginia at the moment. My car is quite full! It's officially a tuffet! I will take better photos of this next week, because I am exhausted at the moment. Tomorrow I am on my way to buy foam, upholstery fiber, and feet. Then I will be heading to Chicago to visit the international quilt Festival. I will have so much to tell about… Next week. :-) I'm at my tuffet affiliate workshop in North Carolina. We haven't done any sewing yet, but I can show you tuffet inspiration! These are all by Sharyn Cole. Aren't they beautiful? Here are my strips laid out: And those of Karena, my table-mate, along with a view of our workspace. We aren't actually sharing sewing tables, just the cutting table. I can't wait to get started! Prepare yourself for many, many photos to come. ;-) Wow. So much has happened in the past few days. A month ago I formed unSpooled, LLC, but hadn't quite finished everything up. Tonight I'm on the road, traveling to North Carolina to become a Tuffetsource affiliate instructor, Friday I'm going to the International Quilt Festival in Chicago, and next week is Spring Break. So, I really wanted to get some things done before this two week period. Of course, life being as it is, I didn't get some things done until just last night. One of them is this website. I've been working on it since the middle of February, but wasn't quite ready to pull the trigger. But here we are! I'm using Weebly to host, and for the most part, their templates are reasonably easy to use. Though I have a history in IT, I've been so far removed from it that my knowledge just isn't that useful any more. It's like being a really good switchboard operator and being given a smartphone. Luckily, so many things are just drag and drop, it's not a problem. I may play around with templates until I settle on the right one. I also may copy over some of my posts from My Feed Dogs Are Down, mostly the ones that give advice or instruction. I may feature these as my very own little Throwback Thursday.
them multiple times gave me time to really appreciate different things about them. Until next time, which I'm sure will be a tuffet update, please enjoy a slideshow of the work of the Madison Modern Quilt Guild! |
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