From UFO to Quick Gift!!

One of my clients has had an amazing office manager who made my life so much easier. Sadly, she is moving this week, and I wanted to make something for her as a goodbye and thank-you present.

Since time was of the essence, I needed to start with something partially made….think UFO!!

Several years ago, I appliquéd two funky flowers as practice to see if I wanted to make more…

That particular project didn’t get any further, but these two flowers looked to be the perfect start for a mug rug!

I started out by squaring up the block, then spent some time deciding how large I wanted it to be and how big I wanted the corner triangles to be…

Once decided, I quickly sewed them in place and squared it up one more time….

I decided I didn’t want to have to apply binding, so I planned to “burp” the quilt instead. Come back next Tuesday, and I will show you my method for doing this!!

I sat down to start quilting, but thought the machine was making a strange sound…..

YEP….that isn’t right!!

A bit of re-threading, and I ended up with a good quilting stitch. After that, the quilting was fast and easy….

….just an outline and a swoop!!

So, within about an hour, I had a quick gift ready to go…..

….AND, I got rid of another UFO at the same time.

A WIN-WIN!!

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It needs a little green….

Before I started on my “Abiding Garden” appliqué, I decided to let the garden grow, one flower at a time, roughly following the pattern I had made…

As I was about to add the 3rd, 4th, and 5th flowers, I suddenly remembered that some stems needed to be put in place first so they could run behind the new flowers.

I was happy that I had made a bunch of stems AND leaves….

…so I could just pick some to add.

Placement was fairly easy, although I did have to finagle the yellow flower stem a bit to get it where I wanted!!

With it glued in place, the applique was quick and easy….

NEXT……

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Who knew I would enjoy hand-appliqué SO much!

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Abiding Garden Update

I am starting to build momentum with my appliqué garden.

One of the problems I struggled with was how to mark the designs and how to hold them onto the background while I did the hand stitching.

Previously, I had glued all of the petals together and glued the entire flower to the background. The problem was that the petals came loose as I manipulated the fabric to reach the appliques, OR (even worse), the thread wrapped around the loose petals!!

So, I needed a change of plans!!

Before placing the third flower, I put my pattern underneath and had a good look.

I am about to stitch another of the long, spindly flowers, but this one will be partially covered by the lower daisy……

This time, I decided to do a rough drawing of where the flower would be placed….

…. a VERY ROUGH drawing!!

It worked well, as I was able to place the petals one at a time and then appliqué them…

…and I quickly had the flower completed….

I did make one change for the final of these flowers. I was more careful with my marking so that I knew EXACTLY where each petal was going….

That made it much easier to place the petals!

We are flying now…… more next week!

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Who knew I would enjoy hand-appliqué SO much!

Join me in this journey by subscribing to the blog…

Collaborative Quilt to Come….

We have finally worked through all of the the UFO’s that my Mom left for me. I consider this next one to be MY UFO rather than hers.

In the past, Mom and I had worked on a couple of collaborative quilts. The first was this one….

Mom had appliqued tons of these gorgeous flower blocks…..

…but couldn’t figure out what to do with them. I stepped in and turned them into a flower showcase!!

Next, I found a pattern from “Piece O’ Cake designs and sent Mom blocks to applique. Those I turned into this wonderful quilt…

There were WAY TOO MANY borders in this quilt’s making!!

Since that had been so successful, I sent another set of blocks….

….and she proceeded to quickly applique them and send them back.

At this point, her eyesight was failing, so these blocks aren’t quite at the same quality level.

But they are BEAUTIFUL and truly need to be finished into a quilt.

….And they will be…..SOMEDAY!!

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The importance of a thimble!!

Another reason I struggled to get started on my “Abiding Garden” appliqué was my thimble.

Several years ago, I performed a thorough search of thimbles and couldn’t find one that would work with my arthritic fingers. I finally decided that my best solution was to make one from elastic athletic bandages. It is not a permanent thimble, but I can normally get two uses out of each one that I make.

But I was finding that the end wasn’t thick enough to stop the needle from penetrating it, especially when I had to stitch through the glue used to prepare the pieces.

Before I could continue sewing, I had to fix this problem.

I had a packet of leather “dot” thimbles, so I tried one of those first….