Quilter's Progress

Yesterday's agenda included plenty of running around in the middle of the day. Even so, I had quite a bit of time in the morning to work on my stitching. I'm off to a pretty good start on Block 3 of the Friendship's Garden quilt.

When I stopped for the morning, I went straight to work on the Quiltmaker's Garden quilt. There was one more of these square-center flowers to finish. This one is partially covered by the applique vine, and so I quilted up to the vine, but then left the other areas open.

By this time, I'd quilted all around and partially outlined the vine. It seemed as good a time as any to quilt the whole thing. I outlined all the leaves and the vine itself, then filled in veins on the leaves and some circles on the vine.

It took quite some time to do the whole thing. Here's how it looks from the back.

Then it seemed a good time to quilt one of the two birds on the quilt. This was done with a ferny feather, and then I quilted some leaves on either side of him.

Here's how that looks from the back.

There is one more bird on the other side of the quilt...a blue jay...I'll come back for him. In the meantime, I filled in more of the terry twists and Greek keys. There must be an end to this at some point, don't you think?

From there, I decided to try quilting some of the other flowers. If you look at the image of the whole quilt, you can see that there are some tulips on both sides of the quilt. Or maybe they're iris. I'm really not sure what kinds of flowers these are, but I had in mind what I wanted to do there.

So I quilted "petals" into the flowers. Then quilted some edges to the leaves and gave them some veins. For the stalk, I simply quilted a wavy line up the middle, and this connected all the leaves and flowers so that I avoided cutting thread.

Here's how that looks from the back.

There were some open sections on each side. I considered leaving them open, but then decided I could quilt some tendrils coming off on each side. It seemed to me that the open space was too large there, and it needed something for quilt integrity.

By that time, I needed to hit the shower and get ready to leave the house. As it turns out, I wasn't able to return to the quilt yesterday. Instead, I spent the afternoon collecting fabrics and supplies for the Designing from Nature class I'm taking up in Vancouver for the next four days.

This is the same class I've taken twice before, taught by Ann Shaw, and using the technique developed by Ruth McDowell. These are the two quilts I've made from previous classes:

This is the "Working for Peanuts" quilt top I made on my own. I'm hoping to get this one quilted in June.

For this class, I'm doing the image below of the laughing flamingos. This photo was taken while we visited Homosassa Springs in Florida earlier this year.

It's cropped from the original photograph below. I would dearly love to have included the flamingo on the left, but he's just a little too far away and mostly outside the frame for that to work very well. It's a better photo with just the two birds. I've printed and I'm taking both photos, but I expect to use the one above.

All my crap is piled together in the doorway of the sewing room, and I've pulled so much fabric it isn't even funny. It's not funny because, in my experience, I use very little of my own fabric and end up "shopping" for fabrics at the quilt shop where the class is held. Ann Shaw has quite a knack for choosing fabrics, and it's hard to resist when she makes a suggestion about something. I'll say I held fast when choosing the fabric for the laces on my brother's shoes. I don't recall what she suggested, but she later admitted I'd been right about that.

This morning I have a dental appointment to take care of a problem discovered just before we left on our trip last September. It hasn't caused me any problems, but it will eventually. And that's how I know it's going to be a miserable morning. I'm hoping I'll be able to get back to my sewing this afternoon, because there won't be any more until Monday of next week.