Sunday, May 15, 2016

About Ewe


This is a project I have been working on for some months now. I made great progress and then it went to the wayside. The baby that will receive this is coming up on her first birthday so I am pushing this back to the top of the UFO pile. It began with seeing my friend Shelley's version of this. She found it on a Quiltmaker site. I just love it and decided to make my own version from the photograph so mine is not the same size and also has different construction and many different design elements.  

The flowers in the original are dimensional but since the baby will get to use this that was something I changed. I will add to the flowers with the quilting itself. My friend Suze found the butterfly fabric at the Valley Of The Sun Retreat in the give away bin. They were on a white background...........I fussy cut them and appliqued them on. I just wish I had three but two will do. The sheep eyes are reverse applique and the pupils are just made with a pigma pin. Buttons would have been cute but again this is for a baby. It is now ready for borders after much more time that I though I would spend on it. Below you can see the hexagons I started with. Some of them are already sewn together. I opted for whole hexi units instead of the half hexis in the original. I did not want seam across the center of each block. This made for many, many Y seams but I just added one or two rows each time I worked on this. That part of the top went quickly. It was all the applique which stalled this project. The applique parts were needle turn applique and include the flower stems, leaves, flower centers, the butterflies and the sheep eyes.  



Thursday, May 5, 2016

I Do This Because It Relaxes Me




This is my second nesting robin. I kinda put this and most of the rest of my quilting on the back burner because life is so darned full of changes and things are just plain busy. I have to say that my life is just in flux right now. I have been doing things but not posting much. I pulled this out about a month ago and decided I needed to have something to do while everything else is going crazy around me. It is currently in a stage where there is lots of handwork, and it is also fairly small as well. This makes it perfect to drag around with me. My coworker saw this the other day when I was showing it to someone at work and wanted to know why I was working on this. Well the answer for me was easy. "It relaxes me". There is really no other reason for doing this. I love making quilts and I especially love needle turn applique and handwork. It is very relaxing and when finished is just beautiful to look at. Working on something like this just brings joy to my life and I love watching it change and progress. The end of this project will be a total surprise and I am just making it up as I go.

The block that this began with
The first border
The project began with just one block in colors that I just love. Then a border, and another. So far so good. Now to add some beautiful applique to those big triangles. The first try was not the right color so I picked it out and began again and I just love how it looks so far.

The second border with the beginning of an idea


The above photo is more complete than the others. There will be some more things added once I have completed all the other triangles to this stage. I am working on adding the leaves to the last triangle.
 
There are a million and one ways to do applique. Most of which require lots of preparation. I learned needle turn applique when I first learned to quilt back in the early 1980's and have tried other things and always come back to the simplicity of this method. It just requires marking the turning line on the fabric and then turning under that edge one stitch at a time with the long straw needle. It yields very nice clean edges and for me goes fairly quickly. There is nothing to wash out at the end or added bulk that other methods require. Not for everyone but it works for me. You can see the leaf on the right below where I just started to turn under the edge of the first side. This slow stitching is very relaxing and portable and I love doing it.