Thursday, August 30, 2012

Delinquent Jubilee+5

Yes, very delinquent.

I celebrated my Jubilee+5 birthday back in July. Because of a very busy schedule trying to get two quilts ready for our guild's quilt show in June, I decided to wait to even begin my quilt until my birth month - July.

Unfortunately, my life is still pretty stressful and some days I feel at the end of myself both physically and emotionally. Because of that, I've chosen to make my Jubilee+5 quilt a fairly simple one with bright colors. I needed some color therapy!

This is my version of a quilt I saw on Quiltsalott's blog. I admire her quilts very much.

My version will be wallhanging size and represents anything I might see in my flower garden - mostly flowers but I've included a butterfly, birds, bugs and bunnies. I used the Matilda's Own Kumo template to fussy cut the images.
After a few hand piecing errors (butterflies sometimes fly sideways but trees generally do not grow horizontally), I'm on my way to piecing it together. This has been a good project to take with me to work on in spare moments in waiting rooms.

There are a total of 56 blocks - one for each of my 55 years plus I plan to embroider my inital on the center pink 56th. block. In the picture above, I'm trying out the letter M printed on paper. The more I look at it, the more I think its too large for the block so will be making it smaller.

I plan to big stitch quilt the wallhanging but I'm not sure what color perle cotton to use. I've thought about gray to match the squares or bright pink or orange. Any ideas?

Until later, Mayleen

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Finally making progress

After about 6 weeks of cutting, pinning, cutting, pinning, fiddling and finally doing the applique work - the center of my Jubilee quilt was done (except for the very center). Yay!!
It was so exactly what I had pictured.
Every part was perfect (at least to me!!).  And then I came to the borders and everything came to a screeching halt!!  For about 2 months.
I finally had a breakthru and realized what was wrong.  I made these petals smaller and added more of them, including 5 scallops on each side (my original design had 4).
The creative juices were flowing again.  The Olympics has given me a lot of time to work on the applique.  There are 20 scallops and almost 200 petals.  But I'm over halfway done - yay!!!!
I still had a huge problem of what to put in the middle between the scallops, but with the help of a very special friend, I finally broke thru that hurdle too (almost).
So for now, I'm back on track.  My goal is to have the top done before Christmas - I think I can do it. 
-Karen