Judgement Day!

You can tell from this closeup of one of my sizzix flowers that judgement day came and I had to make a final decision about how to best layout all the applique pieces of this quilt. Sometimes the “itchin to get stitchin'” takes over and you just cross your fingers and hope your layout will work. When I’m fusing a lot of applique shapes over a large scene, I have to “ground” the design by making absolutely sure that the major lines of the quilt are correct. To do this, you remove everything except the major design elements and fuse them first, as in the photo below:

(You have to trust me that the colors on the background fabric are far richer than what the camera shows in these pictures.) Once I felt good about the positioning of the swirl stems and the large flowers, I went back and added all those applique daisies at the base:

Here’s a closeup of some of the daisies. These were kind of fun because I made some of them one color, some have 2 petal colors, and some have 3 petal colors:

Once the daisies were on, I went into the final fusing phase and added the teardrop shaped leaves onto the swirl stems:

I may go back in later and add a butterfly or bird up near the top, but I need to think about that for awhile. At this stage, it was in a place where I could start adding some thread work or embroidery to the top to jazz things up, and I was chomping at the bit for that! Here’s a shot of a flower on the machine bed as I was still adding some EKG-edge finishing to the outer layer of petals. You can see the effect of the thread work since some petals have thread work and others don’t:

Do you see those pins around the perimeter of the flower? Those are there because this is still just a quilt top. Those pins are holding a piece of scrap batting behind the flower so it is being trapuntoed. The excess batting will later be cut off but the flower will protrude out on the final quilt because of that extra layer of batting. Here’s a shot of the flower once the thread work was complete:

I’ll post more pictures as this quilt develops further. It’s been very fun to be able to make a quilt this quickly!

Filed under Free Motion Embroidery, Sizzix.

2 Comments

1. Sharon Says:
   
   October 8th, 2010 at 4:00 pm

   Hi Patsy

   Thank you for sharing this lovley quilt. I love your daises. Looking forward to seeing the finnished quilt.
   Sharon

2. Stephanie Says:
   
   October 10th, 2010 at 5:25 am

   Patsy,
   This is beautiful. Thanks for sharing the process with us. Your attention to detail is stellar.