When I started my “Abiding Garden” hand-appliqué project, I thought it would be slow, but I didn’t expect it to be quite THIS SLOW!!

When I last posted about it, I had glued/pinned two flowers to the background….

My plan was to spend a bit of time most nights and do the applique, but life has gotten in the way.

This is convention season for Michael’s side-hustle, and I needed to travel with him to help with photography and videography. Consequently, I was away from home for almost half of February!!

Needless to say, there was NO stitching going on!

When I did make a start, I added the yellow flower, but was unhappy when I realized that I hadn’t pulled the threads tight enough on each stitch, and it didn’t look great. I tugged on the threads from the back and was able to tighten it up…..

….but I am thinking that I may need to re-sew them at some point.

The problem with THAT is that I had already cut out a lot of the backing fabric…

…before I discovered the loose stitches.

Needless to say, I was disappointed, and my stitching motivation went out the window.

But, I am happy to say that I am back at it now…..

…and am being SUPER careful to pull the threads tight on EACH stitch!!

When I left you last week, I had finished preparing 2 flowers, ready to be sewn onto the background.

But first, I had to put them into their proper place!

I got impatient one night and did a bit of sewing, appliquéing sets of petals together…

I glued the sets together, so I had a complete flower to start with.

I placed my pattern on top of the backing….

….and put my first two flowers in place, including the stems….

Now I had to get the flowers UNDERNEATH the paper…..

I added a dab of glue to hold the flowers in place….

…..and finished off with a few tiny applique pins to hold everything in place….

WOO-HOO……

I’m finally ready to start sewing….at least the first two flowers!!

As I am preparing to start stitching the flowers in my “Abiding Flower Garden”, I needed to spend some time making leaves!

I started out by pulling a number of leaf drawings…..

…and tracing/copying them onto the fusible stabilizer, and cutting them all out…..

At the end, I didn’t want to waste any fusible, so I just cut out shapes that could be turned into leaves.

I picked out a few and fused them onto various 2.5-inch scraps….

It was time to move downstairs and spend some time in my chair, in front of the TV….

After about an hour, I had finished prepping a nice set of leaves….

I figured I’d use them in groups of similar sizes and colors, so I needed a way to store they could be found easily.

After a bit of thought, I pulled out a piece of paper, added two lines of glue, and stuck my leaves to them…

They are easily removed and will stay in place until I am ready to use them…

But, of course, 18 leaves won’t get me very far, so I fused a bunch more…..

I do believe that it is time for more “Father Brown“!!

I am SLOWLY getting ready to start attaching bits to the background fabric.

I CAN’T WAIT!!