Friday, March 27, 2009

Gladiolus Finished!


I finally finished quilting the gladiolus. I stitched from the center of the flower outwards in the shape of the petals. I used a red-orange thread throughout except on the small yellow area to the right. That was the lightest spot and I wanted it to stand out to show the light hitting it directly. I also removed some of the yellow lines on the lower petal. They just didn't seem to be quite right. The yellow-orange background piece seemed to have wavy lines heading upward so I heavily quilted it using the same wavy line pattern. I've never used so much quilting on a piece before and it is very flat!

I probably procrastinated most on the binding. I knew a regular binding would be too heavy for the quilt and a satin stitch would ruin the richness of the quilt. I finally opted to use a very small piping that was left over from a large bed quilt I finished two years ago. I actually put that on before I did any of the quilting. The orange fabric in the piping is not like any of the other oranges in the quilt and I feel may have worked well for that reason.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Small Work


I've accomplished another small quiltlet about 9" x 11" in size. Winter just won't leave us this year and Tuesday I got up to a coating of ice on everything canceling school yet again. We'll be going all summer at this rate! Anyway, a day at home gave me a day of playing with fabric. I took an old magazine picture from my collection folder and made it using all cool colors. Quilt in a day! Maybe having a day off now and again and confined to the house isn't so bad?

I scanned it into the computer rather than photograph the piece since the colors turn out more natural this way, but the binding is not shown, either. I didn't quite know what to do for the binding when I started but when I laid it atop a piece of dark blue-violet it worked, so I just cut the binding from that which made a nice frame for the quiltlet, too.