DK Quilt Guild: A place for quilters to gather, share ideas, projects, and to make the world a better place, one quilt at a time. Join us and share your thoughts, projects, questions, and tips. Quilters here are at many different levels of skill. Beginners and non-quilters are welcome, too.
We NEED diarists! Your diary can be elaborate and full of photos, a simple story of your own quilting history or that of someone you love, a discussion of a current project or a technique you're learning, new adventures... You could post quilt retreat-day recipes (things like crockpot meals, so food appears without much attention from you)... We could do show and tell or open thread, also, but either way, we need diarists to host. It is EASY if you're willing to take the chance.
My sister has multiple myeloma, a deadly cancer of the blood and bones. Next week she starts chemo. It will be 8 hours of lying on her back with a port in her abdomen through which they will run 4 chemo(ish) agents. If she doesn’t do this, it is likely she won’t live 3 more months.
She wanted something colorful for her living room wall where she will likely spend a lot of time in her recliner. What I did was the wall hanging above.
Some of you will recognize it as an Edyta Sidar. I love her designs, and this is from a laser cut kit. The problem is realistically I don’t think you can trust those pieces to stay in place. So I used a small (1.6 mm) stitch to hold the pieces in place. Sometimes I used an very small applique stitch, sometimes a small straight stitch, depends on what I felt was needed. A close up below shows some of these stitches.
The stems, umbrella, and the daffodil petals have a very small applique stitch. The purple flowers and the cups on the daffodils have straight stitch. The yellow in the center of the purple flower is a small piece of yellow wool glued on.
I made a few minor changes, including centers for the purple flowers, an eye on the bird and a butterfly that I cut out.
Yes, the butterfly has both white and pink raw edge applique. I used a lot of different colored threads on this. I wanted the threads to hold the pieces in place, but not distract from the overall piece.
I did not do traditional binding on this. I tried something new and I really like it: binding with the back fabric. I think it gave it a cleaner look. I did something a little different on the top stitching. I used my stitch-in the-ditch foot, but moved the needle just to the outside, so the flange on the foot easily slid along the ditch, while my needle very precisely stitched on the turned over binding.
Next week is the Ukrainian quilt.
Some instructions on how to self-binding a quilt, or binding with the back fabric:
This one is a bit more complicated than necessary, but good instructions.
Or here.
So how about you? How is your quilting coming?