Cre-8’s

Last week we had the “Christmas” meeting of our creative group, 8 amazingly talented women who get together 3 or 4 times each year.  The last meeting had to be canceled because too many people were unable to attend, so we had a couple of projects that were due.

The first was a project that we first discussed early in the year and then got together in June to talk thru our ideas.   The idea was that we would each make a project from this pattern……

To remember our original plans, check out this blog post.

I think that none of us really got into this idea and thus it has taken us a long time to present our quilts and several are still in the planning or creating stage, but the ones that were shone were stunning…..

Cleo showed off her magnificent hand appliqued piece.   she is planning to add some beads and other bling to finish it off.   It will be amazing….

Next was Denise who ALWAYS is the first one to be finished with her projects!!!!

I LOVE her colors…..

Fay, who recently had a knee replacement and couldn’t be there, sent her W-I-P.   She is using crayons to color the design before adding quilting…..

Ruhanna moved completely out of the quilting realm and made this adorable beaded purse……

Linda went with fusible applique ad added some gorgeous gridded quilting.  She wasn’t sure about the inner border, but we all encouraged her that it added so much to the piece…..

I had so many thoughts about this piece when the challenge was first released, but with all of the craziness of this past summer, I eventually went with my strength and simply quilted it…..

I was originally thinking that I would work with a “Zentangle” approach, but wasn’t happy with how it was looking so I finally got out a marker and started adding the accents that I couldn’t do with thread.  For the basket, I sewed the grid in with thread and then drew in the checkerboard squares…….

I also added a few dots here and there…..

The final step was to add a bit of shading with Inktense pencils.   This worked fine until the very last leaf where I added too much water and the color bled outside the quilted line…..ARGH!!!…..

To fix it, I let it dry and then added another line of quilting, echoing outside the original line.

But, the final frustration was when I trimmed it to the finished size.   I managed to cut it too short at the bottom and ended up catching part of the leaf in the binding…..

When I have a minute or two, I am going to un-stitch the curve of the leaf and make it a bit shallower.   That will fix the ultimate problem, but I am still frustrated that I didn’t finish it well!!!

In the next post, I will show the Christmas giveaway project that we all worked on!!!!