Grow!

This year I want to grow my business, grow as an artist, grow as an entrepreneur, and why not grow spiritually/emotionally, too?

(Physical growth, on the other hand, I'd like to leave to plants and flowers; that's one area where I'd prefer to shrink a little, thank you.)

This finished at about 15"x23", and awaits a hanging sleeve. I drew the letters with a Sharpie on a piece of freezer paper, then traced onto Steam-a-Seam2 to create the applique shapes. Each letter is a different green batik.

After I'd pieced and spray-basted, I snapped a photo, which revealed one lone patch of very pale citron batik that was much too light to blend in:

Whoops.

Fortunately, I had some small green leaf shapes left over from another project (finished over two years ago), that I'd had the foresight to stash in a little baggie in the green scraps drawer, which had been dumped out onto the sewing table for scrap-piecing the background. So they were right there when I needed them! If I'd had to go looking for them I might still be searching. They cover up the too-light piece very nicely:

I tucked some rick-rack around the center oval, just for fun. It's blue because that's what I had a right-sized length of.

Secret slap-dash piecing tricks: I did not applique the letters to the oval (they were fused, but not yet sewn) or sew the center oval to the background (which is a donut, with a big gap in the middle under the oval) until the quilting stage. The zig-zag stitching around the letters is all the quilting I did in the middle. Then I tucked the rick-rack under the purple purple edge (a folded bias strip) and stitched in the ditch between the purple and yellow and then along the outside edge of the purple to hold everything in place.

Scrap-piecing the background frame and getting it put together to the right size was the trickiest and most time-consuming part of the process. Overall, a fun, almost quick project. It will hang in my office as a daily reminder of how to proceed through the year.