Appliqued

Hi everyone!  As I was thinking out what i was going to write here, I thought, "Happy Hump Day", and then realized that it's Thursday.  Oh well .... I thought I'd share my progress on my Applique project.

Ta da!  I now have a new appreciation for the labor that goes into applique.  I took the easy route by using a fusible product and finishing the edges with a short zigzag stitch.   This is my first experience using Steam A Seam fusible web (sheets), and although this product is very easy to manipulate (reposition pieces, etc.) I was a little disappointed that my edges looked frayed after stitching.  I experimented with both a traditional applique blanket stitch and a zigzag, finally settling on the zigzag.  I also can't mention how many times I stupidly traced my pattern onto the wrong side of the fusible web!  I bet someone has a neat trick for avoiding this like marking some colored dots on one side.  If you have a helpful tip, please let me know.

I'd love some feedback from anyone who has tried Piece O' Cake Designs' overlay method of applique.  The overlay is a print of the pattern (I traced mine onto tracing paper) in which you "overlay" on top of the pieces prior to sewing to ensure proper positioning of the pieces.  I found this to be very tedious but I wanted to give it a try.  No doubt the results are very precise, but in this case, I'm not sure how imporant that is to me.

I'm still here

Hey everyone, I'm back!  Life has been full and busy -- mainly all good, thankfully.  I have been doing a little bit of sewing, but not much.  Here's a peek at my new project.

The pattern is from the recent Fons & Porter magazine and is from Piece O' Cake Designs.  I've wanted to do an applique quilt for a long time, and this seemed an ideal project.  I'm using lightweight fusible and will machine applique the shapes to the background.  Although I have tried my hand at needle-turn applique with some small projects like this one, I decided that was a bit to challenging for me to tackle at this point.

The most difficult part so far, was selecting the background fabrics.  The Piece O' Cake quilt featured in the magazine has a very colorful background, but looks cohesive because all of the fabrics are from POC's own fabric line.  I wanted to use all fabrics from my stash and not make any unnecessary purchases, so I spent a lot of time auditioning different fabrics until finally settling on what you see here.

My kids' spring break was at the beginning of the month.  I spent a week at home on a "stay-cation".  One day I took my daughter to the park for a picnic.

We had fun hanging out on our quilt, playing Scrabble on my Kindle.

This is an old Bento box quilt made from Japanese fabric.  It usually lives on the couch, but served equally well as a picnic quilt.

The view from our quilt.

I hope everyone is enjoying their Spring!

Playing around with some new fabrics

My daughter insisted I buy the castle fabric for her while we were at the Pajaro Valley Quilt Show last month.  The line is called "castle peeps".  I just bought the two prints showed here and will fill in the rest of the quilt with stash fabric.  I thought the blue print coordinated well - it has an orange peel print w/ a hornet or bee at the center.  I want to add a crenelated border to echo the castle print.  I still need to decide on fabrics and "do the math".  This may be in process for a while!

I'm on spring break this week and what better use of my time than to go fabric shopping?  My absolute favorite fabric store in the City - Peapod Fabrics - just reopened in a new and bigger location last Friday and I made it to the store on Sunday.

It was wonderful to visit with the shops' owner and see all of the fabulous fabrics on display.  The store is still very small by most standards but probably double the size of the former location.  I found fabric backings for two quilts in my WIP pile - the Ohio Star quilt from the Shrinking Quilters' Bee (the yellow print) and an aqua solid for my triangle quilt and the solid brown for the binding.   

The small cuts are not fat quarters but are small cuts (I haven't measured them but they are maybe 1/3 smaller than a fat quarter.  This is my only quibble with the store - she doesn't carry fat quarters.  I'm really loving the purples, browns and beige colors in these scraps.  I'm imagining these prints in small scale paper pieced blocks.  We'll see.

It's a pillow... at last!

Seriously,  I had a major phobia about putting a zipper into a pillow form.  The fabric, embroidery (from a class I took at a quilt show) and various zippers have been hanging out on my work table for about a month.  It's far from perfect -- I was a little confused about where to start stitching around the zipper and there is a gap at both ends.  I used the tutorial by Sewkatiedid (http://sewkatiedid.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/zip-to-your-pillow/) and "winged" the parts that weren't clear to me.

It feels good to have another long lingering WIP completed.