Petal to the Metal

Hi, hope everyone's holidays have been fun! Around here, as with most folks, some things sped up and others slowed down.

After this...

Gift-wrap Central

cutting out Lucy's (giant) quilted Minnie Mouse stocking

     ...and this....

were finished, it was full speed ahead (as much as possible) on the work in progress.

As mentioned in the last blog post, I envisioned a large-scale flower against this pieced background of hand-dyes. So, voila!--it appeared.

First I thought there were too many flower petals here...but it turns out, there are too few!

Well, okay, it only appeared after some drawing and tracing. (Notice the kitchen paraphernalia that came in handy here.)

Meanwhile, some of nature's other creatures and features also appeared from my stash for auditioning, along with some Northcott Stonehenge fabric (thank you, Alex and Shannon) for a bottom border--which went a long way toward grounding the whole scene.

Fortunately for me, frost asters continue blooming in autumn!

I liked the fact that the foreground colors were echoed in the leaves near the top, but felt that some blue needed to be in the foreground for balance.

After auditioning a traced profile with some blue fabric pinned to it (below at left), I decided to go ahead and piece and paint (and color-pencil) a blue jay.

After that it was time to take a break and audition some thread. These are the variegated spools my dear friend Janet recently gave me when she decided to switch to a different line of thread for her longarm. Some of them should work really well for this project.

Like my storage method?

With a few more tweaks to the quilt top, I hope to sandwich the quilt and put PEDAL to the metal in the next couple of weeks.

I hope you've been able to squeeze some quilting time into your holiday schedule. If you're anything like me, nothing maintains or restores your sanity like working on a quilt.

Happy New Year, everyone!!

Linda