Hitting the Blocks

Alice over at BC Quilter recently did a post on the landscape quilt she’s been working on. Isn’t it lovely!

I’ve always wanted to try one, and just haven’t gotten to it yet. Perhaps it’s time to jump that technique ahead a few projects…

I’m all a-quiver right about now. I sold my first quilt pattern this past week, and tonight got it nicely wrapped up to send out (hopefully it’ll beat lil’ Miss Hanna Almost-a-Hurricane out of the state). Of course I’ve got the shipping jitters, the “Did I get everything perfect? Did I forget anything?” nervous twitches.

The pattern that sold is Cup O’ Joe to Sew, available here.

The funny thing is, I am almost done a new version of this quilt (as in the top is pieced, it’s mostly quilted, and one of the sides is bound). I call it the same thing, Cup O’ Joe to Sew.

I’m hoping to have time to finish it this weekend. Maybe not if the power goes out…

I have now joined the same club as Scarlett O’Hara and Maria von Trapp and made some lovely outfits from curtains.

Well, just one curtain to be exact. My mother was auditioning this beautiful brown fabric with the embroidered vines for her new bedroom, and I decided it was just too pretty to leave in the bedroom.

There really wasn’t enough to make a full skirt, but I found the darker brown fabric on sale at Jo-Ann’s and between the two was able to make matching skirts for me and my daughter (she’s still at the age where matching Mommy is a cool thing Not sure I’d use that kind of fabric again–it shreds like crazy (thank goodness for my serger), and every needle prick made the tiniest of runs in the fabric.

And here’s my final product. I had a blast making it (yes, even all those little flowers), despite the time crunch at the end (that was my fault for not starting it until after recital, which was June 22nd.)

And now back to my previously scheduled life…

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!