Time to Finish the PPM Quilt

I guess quilting is my down time occupation. There isn't the intense focus required , as when I Thread paint. Only enough to keep your fingers out of the way of the rotary cutter and the needle on the sewing machine. (Touch wood, I've avoided both so far.)
I used my spare time at work, the last few weeks, to take apart the blocks form the original PPM. They were white with blue and green charm squares and when it was assembled it did nothing for me.

 

 

So I patiently un-picked the blocks. (Feels like I've been here before).

 

The white material won't be wasted. It will simply have to wait its turn anon.

I had played with the design in my EQ and decided I wanted to enlarge it all around with sashing.

That was all well and good but still boring, so I changed colours and eventually end up with black.

This was much more exciting. (Can you tell all my children were boys?)

So I spent today re-sewing the blocks using a dark charcoal. Now the charm squares are important in their framing. I'll trim and press the rest tomorrow. And start arranging them into their final design, ready for two rows of sashing.

  

 



 

 

 

MY Scaredy Squrriel

This little guy has been haunting me ever since I saw the photo back in early winter.
I finally got my head around the how and finished him up today. The process is similar to most of my animal renditions so I'll simply give you the photos of the journey.

Cheeky little fellow

 

So follow along as I assemble this cute little devil.

Paper pattern
 

Cloth cartoon
 

 At this point the Red highlights were added to the basic cartoon.


Body stitching with bobbin colours showing to add depth and multi colour

Placed on the background

 After a lot of the background, or body stitching was complete, the cartoon was placed on the background. It was necessary at this point to be able to have the edge stitching  (fur) pass onto the background. At this point too most of the possible distortion had been tamed.

14 different colours

All that as left to do at this point was to stitch the background for dimension, add a suggestion of trees and add a little additional shading to the rump of the squirrel. What did I use? Crayon.

BFF No Matter What The Weather - Sold

It rained overnight.
My only question was how much.
That was something  that could be done incrementally.
After carefully smoothing and anchoring the organza, I started with foreground rain, spaced 2 inches apart. I lay down strips of painter's tape to keep my lines parallel. It was removed to do the rest.

Using a slightly different shades of gray I scattered the mid ground rain ( striking the sidewalk and the girls) and the background rain ( behind the girls).

I considered doing a pillowcase binding, but the canvas underlay is too bulky to fold. So I went with a 1/4 black edge.

No Matter What the Weather.. Best Friends for Ever

(Who'd have thought a piece of whimsy could turn so philosophical?) LOL

Best Friends Forever

I just can't sit idle and I can't get into the garden. (I'm not desperate enough to spring clean though.)
Snow is almost gone and rain is in the forecast. I saw some school children the other day in their new rain gear. They were cute!
I don't usually do cute but all I could think of was Sun Bonnet Sue in rain gear. So here she is!
But she looked kind of lonely so I gave her a Best Friend. Who better to splash in the puddles with.

I couldn't help but grin when I looked at this.

Their position on the cloth needed to be defined so the puddles at their feet were on the sidewalk, so an edging of grass was required.

But the whole thing is too bright. I auditioned several colours of organza as an over lay. But they were shiney rather than deepening the colours. Black was great if I was doing a serious piece, but this is whimsy.

I have had a piece of organza in my collection whose colour I can't define ( red? purple? brown?)

It deepened the red and tamed the yellow slicker and there is a complex colour play where it ripples.
This could be the one.

But first, I decided to continue on with the idea of spring flowers. I had no suitable material to add discrete flowers at the right scale so I fell back on one of my favourite method. Fabric Chips
I went thru my scraps and pulled out the pinks, yellows, purple and greens associated with spring flowers.
Where they fell is where they are. After covering the whole piece with a fine netting, and placing a million pins to anchor all the bits, I micro meandered in invisible thread, over all the areas with chips, making sure each piece had a line of stitching holding it in place.

Tomorrow I'll deal with the rain.

Chickadee on the Queen - Final - sold

This little guy finished out at 8 x 10 with the flange and binding. The flange was maybe a step I didn't need but I hadn't decided what colour to bind the piece with. In the end I stayed with the classic black.

I echo quilted the chickadee and the flower and picked out all the stamped batik florets with invisible thread. I almost rotated the bird as it would have looked just as natural. I guess that's still an option, though the hanging sleeve is for the horizontal aspect.