Diane's tea Time!

I've been having such a wonderful time working on my quilt.  It's still on my design wall and I really like the direction it's taken.

I flipped the first border of HSTs so that the solid black fabric edges the towel. I no longer need the polka-dot trim to separate the towel from the border.

I also decided to add more colors to the border of made fabric.  I went digging into my stash and I had a rainbow of mottled solids leftover from a baby quilt  - perfect!  I chopped off random sizes of triangles from the fabric and used them as the centers of the floating triangle blocks.  It makes the quilt so playful, just what I want on my sewing room wall!

Next came the embroidery on the towel pennants.  It took longer than I expected it would. I haven’t embroidered since I was in grammar school (which was many years ago). I thought it would be like riding a bike, something that would come back to me naturally. But it wasn’t!  I was all thumbs trying to make french knots. I finally figured them out along with some easier stitches.

I was going to applique "my studioQ" (what I call my sewing room) on the base of the sewing machine with made multi-colored fabrics.  So I printed out some possible letters and auditioned them:

• left pic - Yikes, those applique letters sure over power the quilt!  Try something else
• center pic - I tried other fonts on my computer, papyrus looked the closest to the lettering on the towel.  I moved the paper letters further to the right, to cover the printed name of the towel's designer, and traced the letters onto the towel.
• right pic - I embroidered the words but "my studio" was too dark or prominant for me. I clipped them off (much easier than ripping a seam out).  I was going to re-embroider them with only one strand of floss but I like it with just the large Q.  It's like an abbreviated nickname for my sewing room.

I wanted to make the quilt bigger.  Adding more floating triangle blocks didn't wow me. So I tried out some tumbler blocks:

They just reminded me of a jester's harlequin costume!  Another reason I didn't like them was that they were too perfect for the "feel" of this quilt. I wanted something less precise.  It dawned on me that I could use the remaining colored triangles I had cut to make wonky HSTs.  I'll share how I make them on my next and hopefully final blog!

I'm off to play and make more blocks!