Progress report redeux - part 2

Patty’s harmonic convergence – I was going to use fabric from my stash, but that plan has veered off course a little. I found three purples and a yellow that I thought looked pretty good. After I got home, they didn’t look so hot. The yellow just didn’t pop. The green/orange butterfly print looked much better than the yellow, and now I’m torn with replacing the lightest purple with the orange metallic pumpkin fabric. It is supposed to be a purple quilt after all. I wanted a watercolory look, not a plaid. And then there is the problem of cutting all these 2 yard long strips. Ricky Tims is coming to gr in april, I’m really tempted to go.

Bandit’s blanket – well, now I have yet more doggy fabric, a nice fleece. It would take an hour to make a pillow, I just have to do it.

ng – I really need to start in on this. If I am going to try to do something more than other people’s patterns, I need to make a start on an original pictorial. However fraught with difficult it may be. I need to put myself out there to see if I can really do it. I’ve certainly go enough books on pictorials, it’s not like I’m inventing the wheel from scratch.

So THE PLAN:
1. get it off the computer at work
2. print it, enlarge it, make pattern
3. decide on how to make it – pieced? Freezer paper? Fused?
4. make it
5. quilt it
6. finish it

Progress report redeux - part 1

it's been more than a month since i posted. kinda sad considering my life is not that busy.

the postcards - still sitting on my counter. considering i'm totally out of the christmas mood, i don't think there is going to be a lot of progress on them.

big snowman looking up - came out ok. it didn't work to embroider the snowflakes on the ribbon because i couldn't center them on the ribbon, so i did them on organza, cut them out (not really close because i was afraid they would unravel) and hung them from the top binding with the same metallic thread i made them out of. they sway with the breeze which is the effect i was after. i couched a fuzzy white yarn over the tops of the trees (harder than it looked, i think there is something wrong with my tension) and satin stitched around the snowman. it's not really quilted otherwise. i might do larger versions of the snowflakes in invisible thread if i get around to it. it doesn't lay flat. i think it's because of the way i put the binding on. but it's finished so i'm going to live with it.

sarah's roman coins - the top is finished. i pretty much banged it out last saturday while mary was at aa. i fused the brocade with pellon and didn't have any trouble at all with it unraveling. i made three stacks of alternating pink and black strips and then sewed the stacks together. i got out of alinement on last stack, it came out higher by half a strip (almost an inch). since i cut the pink brocade fat quarters each fq by itself, i'm not sure if i measured wrong, or there has just a lot of creep while sewing the stack to the others. anyway, rather than redo the whole strip, i ripped out the first stack, moved it to the other side of the high one to give it a kinda stepped appearance _--_ , although if you really look, the little strips don't line up. then i put a black border, then a pink one, then a black one - to make it bigger. i am really out of practice. i couldn't remember how to put on borders so it's kinda patchy, but it worked. then i did the back using the black and on mary's suggestion, i put a big circle of the pink brocade in the middle using dale fleming's freezer paper and glue technique. and boy, it worked well! the back looks better than the front! now all i have to do is figure out how to baste it. and quilt it. i think is best not to quilt through the brocade so i think i will just stitch in the ditch around the pink strips and something dirt simple in the borders. zigzags maybe.