Hitting the Blocks

The saga continues–

After getting the underlying blocks pieced (the actual quilting came later), but before I put on the backing, I did some major applique.

The vase is the most important part, since it is the challenge fabric in all its glory. It has layers of batting underneath it to simulate the curve of a vase. I had to put the brown piping around the edges to make it stand out from the busy background.

I didn’t want much quilting in this section, since vases have nice smooth sides, but again, to diminish puckering fabrics, I ended up quilting the blue feathers and a bit of the branches on the right-hand side. And I gave the peacock a nice black eye too

After that came the cherry blossoms. The branches are appliqued over thin cords of piping. The flowers are made with a Clover Yo-Yo Flower Maker in two different sizes and were sewn on at the very end (after everything else had been quilted and bound and whatnot. Those little seed beads are ones I had left over from a cross-stitch project I started eons ago, and they just happened to be the right colors. Love it! I also couldn’t find fabric I liked, so I turned the fabric I had inside out and used the back side instead.

I decided the window sill needed something else, so I wrote a little poem about the scene. I wanted to do a haiku, to keep with the Asian feel of the quilt, but it was a bit too limited to get across everything I wanted to get across. So I used a tanka, which is the same idea as haiku, but instead 5-7-5 format, it is 5-7-5-7-7. That also became the name of this quilt–”Tanka.”

Outside my window
Pale blossoms dance, wild and free
On sea-scented winds.
Do my captive blossoms yearn
For such perilous freedom?

See the finished quilt in my next post!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Blocks, Personal, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.