Another finish - I promise I'll start sharing some progress posts again soon, but believe me, a lot of progress is going on to get to these finishes!
For now, this has to be my favourite of the recent abundance of finishes (I was looking for a good collective noun I could use for my finishes and got very distracted - did you know that a group of Flamingos is called a flamboyance of flamingos - how good is that? If you have ten minutes to waste, try googling collective nouns!)
Anway. This project started out as many do, on a bit of a whim, and became, as many do, far more involved than originally planned. I had planned to embroider the cat for Mia, who likes cats, and either make it into a cushion by itself, or frame it in a hoop.
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| Bee Curious |
The pattern came from the
Moda Bake shop website and is called the Bee-Utiful quilt. It was designed by Pamela Morgan. She released 20 blocks finishing at about 12" (I think). I ended up picking out the nine I liked best, and shrinking them by 50%. I'm now going to bore you with lots of pictures because this is some of the best embroidery I have EVER done - no more just backstitch and the odd French knot - I've used backstitch, stem stitch, french knots, cross hatch, lazy daisy stitch, satin stitch, chain stitch, and
raised fishbone stitch,
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| Bee Courteous |
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| Bee Courageous |
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| Bee Lovely |
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| Bee Sunny |
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| Bee Charming - he's wearing a Morris Man's hat! |
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| Bee Simple |
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| Bee Sweet |
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| Bee Fruitful - this is the block I am most proud of |
I decided very early on to frame the embroideries with scraps. I foundation pieced the borders suing primarily warm colours with flashes of green and purple. I then found a wonderful warm purple from the Moda Grunge collection that was perfect for the sashing and the binding.
I kept the quilting simple. I started off by hand quilting it, but it didn't look right, so I unpicked it and used the machine to just echo round each scrappy frame.
I used Finca Perle #16 thread for all of the embroidery. I'm using this thread increasingly for both quilting and embroidery: it's very fine and I've built up quite the collection of colours and I don't need to split the strands like I would with embroidery threads. Also, my embroidery threads are stored upstairs and these are in a zippy pouch close at hand - it's lazy, but it makes a difference! It finishes at about 20" x 20".
This is another Finish Along finish. You can find my original list
here.
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