Red Sunflower

Yesterday I was able to finish my Let's Book It project, which I'm calling "Red Sunflower".

It reminds me of the Floristan Sunflowers I grew several years back.

It was a fun experiment working with the decorative stitches on my sewing machine. If you read the beginning of Karen Linduska's book, she gives you lots of permission to experiment and that is exactly what I did.

I was supposed to use "grass stitch" around the edges of the leaves above. This is what her grass stitch looks like on her machine.

I didn't have anything on my machine (a Bernina 750QE) that looked exactly like hers, and so I decided to go with my stitch #631.

She suggested going around each leaf twice, and I ended up doing that just to get it to look the way I wanted it to.

I was never too red hot on the idea of using twisted yarn like she did in her project, pictured below:

After going around the leaves, I decided to use this at the edge of the "ground" piece. I went across one direction, and then turned and went back the other direction. 

But I still wasn't happy with how it looked, and so I went across the edge of the orange-red piece with a satin stitch.

I thought the petals would be more difficult than they were. I ended up adjusting both the length and the width of mine. Then, I was pretty much finished. There was so much bulk in the piece with both the batting and the heavy-weight stabilizer that I didn't think my envelope method was going to work. There was going to be too much bulk at the edges. Besides, my design ended up too close to the edge of the fabric. Next time, I'd cut the foundation piece larger. I decided to use a serging-type stitch at the edge...only, I was so anxious to finish it off that I totally forgot to put a backing fabric on it. Duh.

But now you can see how it looks from the back. I used an invisible monofilament thread in my bobbin.

This was kind of fun, and now that I've done one, I think I can do better next time around. There are some cute projects in this book. I like this one below.

I've tried doing designs like the one below. I like this one, but I can imagine the flowers would be a little tricky to stitch.

I must be in a sunflower mood.

But of all the projects in the book, I think the one below is my favorite. Not sure why...it just appeals to my eye.

So, if I return to my goals for August, I should be working on sewing together the Hello Moon quilt. But then I thought better of it, and I decided to work through from my oldest projects first. And that works out great because I really am feeling a yen to finish this Gardener's Journal quilt, which is close to my oldest unfinished project. Here's how it looked last time I worked on it.

There are three blocks left to piece together, and I have all the embroidery pieces finished. In fact, they've been finished for quite some time.

So that's what I'll work on next. I'd like to get this to the flimsy stage and then work on quilting it in October.

Also yesterday, I made another three quarts of pasta sauce. I'd like to get at least one more batch of pasta sauce and one more batch of salsa, but I'm afraid my tomatoes aren't going to ripen fast enough. I'm planning to supplement my own "stash" with some from the farmer's market tomorrow.

Yesterday afternoon, I checked on the plums. They are nicely purple now, but still quite hard. A few more days and they too will be ready for plum chutney. I might even make a plum tart if I get really energetic.

Today is a cooking day. The kids are coming for dinner tomorrow, and I'm going to make a couple of salads. Valerie has been keeping us supplied with smoked salmon from Alaska, and I'm going to make a smoked salmon cheeseball as well. More about that later.

What do you have planned for the weekend?