Thursday, October 22, 2009

Mistake or Creative License?

I have finished Tom's Dragon Quilt wall hanging. The binding is the same fabric as the little boy's shirt. Some of the 3-D effects turned out so much better than I expected! Of course the camera doesn't capture all that very well. There are puffy clouds, the dragon's eyes, the boy's head, and the little dragons at the bottom, that are all 3-D-ish!

I worked more on the House Medallion quilt too. Here are some of the fan blades I've sewn together in groups of five:
I really had to give a lot of thought as to how to proceed from here. I didn't want to applique the fans 100% and I know I will want to quilt the blades via 'stitch-in-the-ditch. I didn't want to sew the blades down, attaching them to the quilt, until actually quilting it.What I came up with was to use 6.5" squares of Kona white fabric as the background. Above is a fan blade set placed on the white square.

I then folded the edges of the two outer blades of the fans under.
I am making a fabric sandwich! First the white square, then one fan set, right side up, then the next fan set, right side down, and finally another white square on top.
Next I sewed along one side, matching the white squares and matching the fan blades.
I then trimmed the blocks and pressed them open.

Now I have sets of rectangle fan blocks to use for this border.
However, in working on this part of the layout, I discovered that I figured these blocks out, WRONG!!! I am one block short on each side. I am going to get around this by making a flower block that compliments the pink flower buds that are in the center of the quilt. I will put one in the center of each side. I thought that was rather clever. lol I will also hand applique down the fan blade top edges.

For my Post Spooky, I took a photo of my little witch, Zelda. She will be sitting outside our front door on Halloween night, greeting the trick-or-treaters. I haven't been in the mood to decorate as much as I usually do for Halloween. I hope to finish up the decorating that I DO want to do, tomorrow.
Well, that is all from my studio today. I have already been at elementary school, substitute teaching this morning. It is raining out and is supposed to keep raining all day. I think I will stay indoors and enjoy MORE fabric therapy!


LATER THAT EVENING:
Ack!!! I am stuck. I don't know if I am making the right choice to add a flower in the center of each side or if I should break apart the border and have two smaller elements in there to make up the difference????

I have these two photo-shopped with mock ups of what I might do with them. The circle would be a pinkish flower. The exclamation points are really single blades. I either have to add a 6" block in the middle or two 3" blocks on either side. Decisions, decisions!!!

EVEN LATER THAT SAME EVENING:
Gosh, I feel like I am writing a cheap murder mystery novel tonight!!! After much thought and more deliberation, I think I am going to go with this layout:

I took some spare strips of black and put that up on the design wall. Then I laid out the blocks more accurately. NOW I think instead of having a six inch block to play with, I only have five inches. (not counting seam allowances)
SOOOOOOOO, I am going to just put equal sized strips of white in between the fans and space them about like what they look like above in the photo from my design wall. I can add embellishments later if I want, OR I can use the extra white space to maybe show off some fancy quilting when I get that far.

I am now pooped! I think I will go to bed so I am quite rested and can work this out, once and for all, tomorrow! I also am almost done with the "D" for dragon block in the U is for Unicorn quilt. I get bored easily and tend to get side tracked. :)

3 comments:

Jaye said...

Nice job on the dragon quilt! Good work!

Laume said...

The little boy and dragon is really cute - sure wish I could see some of the 3-d affect, that would be cool. I'm not decorating like usual either. Hmmmm. Wonder why.

Sherri said...

Thanks Jaye and Laume!