Bramble Blooms 1 - applique and choosing pink fabrics

Just a very quick post, guessing most of you will be celebrating Thanksgiving today, hope you enjoy your time with family and friends.

I now have my applique blooms and vase all fused down on the centre panel of BB1, next step stitching!  Quilting Babcia left a comment on seeing my proposed flower shapes that they reminded her of crocuses - hooray, exactly what I had intended, I love crocus blooms and had a lot of Autumn Crocus in a previous garden, when in bloom they do not have leaves at all, they arrive after blooming is complete.

Here we are, these could be labelled as  'genetically modified' crocus - it would have been nigh impossible to create the crocus petals individually so I decided to have some fun and create a little quirky bunch of flowers.

Beginning tomorrow I will be deciding on fabrics from the stack below for a baby quilt, hopefully more on that subject next week. This will be a quick, simple small quilt.

So, that's all from me on the last Friday of November, how quickly the years go  by these days!

Hope you can all spend time with your needle and thread over the weekend.

Maureen

Playtime with Bramble Blooms 1

 Our second round of the BB was to create the centre piece using applique,  details of the QAL are in my last post HERE, also you could visit Audrey for all the updates.

After spending a heck of a lot of time thinking up ideas I decided to go simple, flowers in a vase! I will be using my machine for the applique. My inspiration for the shape of the vase is the one below, a very old one given to me by my Aunt.

After trying a few times I decided I had the shape drawn out pretty much as the original,  next step to figure out what to put in it. Sketch pad out again and many pages used before coming up with a few shapes. I cut out and played with placement, first one was this, you can see that the fabric for the vase has already been decided. I liked the odd number of five blooms but DH said he felt the RH side bloom made  the piece look slightly unbalanced

so I added another bloom cut out on the LH side plus a little fabric practice bloom, a decision will be made tomorrow as to which setting I prefer. Next step will then be fabric play, hopefully I'll have something more to show come the weekend.

In between planning BB1 I'm plugging away at my other machine sewing, two quilts and finishing up my hand quilting. Short post this time, back soon.

Maureen

Something New - QAL Bramble Blooms

Something new for me.

Audrey at QuiltyFolk has suggested and organised a QAL, instead of my trying to explain fully what she has in mind I suggest you click on the link for all the information. Main thing is that it's a long term project, covers hand applique and an improv style. No definite pattern to follow. She has suggestions for pulling fabrics from stash, preferably older fabrics but is open to individual ideas. 

I have had a couple of email conversations with Audrey as my colour likes are bright and bold, and full of pattern (those who follow me will know what I work with) and I suspect they may be pretty different to the colours which other participants choose to go with. I still have to go into my scrap boxes for other fragments. My main "older" fabrics I sold some time ago and I don't use many solids in my quilts.

So, here we go and I have picked out four colours to work with

 greens

\

 purples

 yellows

 reds

Yes, there are quite a lot of darks but having tried them all against the Merlot Spot they do work well.  Of the fabrics shown a few are newer ones, others quite a few years old.

The centre panel can be made up of a few different fabrics, a good example on Audrey's post, or cut from one fabric only, I'm going with the fabric shown below using a rectangular for my centre. Yes, it is pretty extreme but I feel it will work, I have used darker centres before in medallion style quilts. This will also come into the borders at some stage.

Merlot Spot

This was the one I pulled before auditioning any others, it was the only one that did it for me, paler ones were lost with the bright colours.

Size of the rectangle 22and1/2" x 26and1/2".

On the RH side of Audrey's blog is a box listing participants of the QAL, head over and visit.

Enjoy the weekend!

Maureen