Cock-a-Doodle Tea Towel is Done!

I finished stitching down the black binding and added the hanging sleeve last night. The black binding is all but invisible in front of the black wall in the studio ... but will look great once it's hanging in my kitchen where the walls are a grayed aqua, similar to some of the fabrics in the quilt.

The quilt measures 40 by 56 inches.  It is machine pieced, hand appliquéd and machine quilted--my first FMQ effort on my Singer 301.

I used the tea towel on which it's based (for the tea towel challenge), a vintage woven tablecloth and quilting cottons from my stash, including some of the Shades of Gray charms from a swap last year, many of which were cream and black, making them perfect to include here.  You can see the made fabric I used in the pieced hens, appliqué backgrounds, plain blocks used to make it all fit together and border triangles.

Besides my quilting adventure on the Singer 301, other first time techniques include using kitchen parchment as a design tool (for the sun section), an appliqué prep technique using a light weight fusible to make it easier to turn under the edges of the tablecloth and the 3D beaks on the hens, created by inserting prairie points into the seam. 

Here's a mosaic of some of the details of the quilt.

I choose this new towel (from Moda Home) after being unable to find a vintage tea towel for this challenge because it had a late 1940's - early 1950's feel to me.  Turns out that it is a reproduction of a design by Ivan Bartlett from that period.