Works in Progress Wednesday

Yay for me!  I finished Mandy's Tree!!  That feels like such a major accomplishment, though my sewing room looks quite bland with it gone.  You can read about it HERE.  The very moment I finished putting on the hanging sleeve, I was brought another bag of fabric for a very special memory quilt.  You can read about it HERE.  Right now, I'm dedicating my time to completing Jesica's quilt. Jesica had a bag of her late & much loved grandmother's fabric stash sent my way a long time ago.  She wanted lots of triangles with white.  Here's what has been done so far.

After hours of sorting and pressing, I spent hours of cutting and stitching and cutting some more until I had a variety of half-square triangles to make a quilt top.  They were all pressed open and then sewn in a graduated color pattern across the quilt.

aren't those vintage fabrics sweet!??

After this point, Jesica began missing her other grandmother too.  The top has a wide white border, and Jesica suggested hand embroidered flowers.  !!!  I am SO in the mood to do embroidery!  Even better, Jesica wants flowers native to this area, because those are the ones that she picked with her grandmother when she was a little girl.  As for me, I have had it in the back of my mind for some time to study native prairie plants, and so this is a very welcomed project!  I started my research immediately.  I want to study the flowers, then sketch them out, and then simplify them for embroidery.  I could find existing embroidery patterns for each on the internet I'm sure, but this would be much for interesting for me to come up with them myself.  I've never been much of a pattern person anyhow.  Here is a peek at my sketchbook so far.  The photos were pretty faded, so I upped the contrast to help you see it better.

My plan is to draw them each with an air soluble pen just prior to stitching them.  I'll pick thread colors that are appropriate to the actual flowers, but also a good shade so it looks right with all the fabrics in the quilt.  I have hoops and embroidery needles.  All is good!  The plan for the outer binding is to use the remaining scraps form the vintage fabrics.  Won't that be pretty!?  Great plan Jesica! Here's some practice pieces I did.

Aster and Purple Vetch

In the mean time, I am putting the backing & hanging sleeve onto Kate's wall hanging.  It's a commission I got through my etsy store to remake my Poles Along the Highway.  Here's the border.  It's for Kate's new home, far far away from the prairies.  Isn't that sweet?

I can't wait to mail this off to her.  I hope our national postal system gets back on its feet soon!  It's been a long, looong time since anything was dropped into my mailbox!

See you all tomorrow,
~Monika

head on over to Lee's at Freshly Pieced for more WIPs, or Esther's eclectic WIP wednesday for more projects from other quilting bloggers.  : )