Applique Tuesday 5/20/14

My regular readers know I just spent the last three weeks making a commissioned signature quilt.  It did have some applique - the label.

I happened to have bought some time ago a panel of labels. Once I found them, I picked out this heart. Now my problem has been how to get the wording evenly distributed on the label and look just right.  Then, too, my penmanship is not that great, so I had to think about how to do this.  So I traced the inner edge of the heart and reversed it on tracing paper.  Then I went to my computer, opened up MS Word and began to  write out the words.  I tested a lot of fonts and sizes til I found one that worked and I liked. Then I printed it out, cut them apart and laid the lines on my tracing.  I had to keep fiddling with the font size to get it just right. When I did I taped the line strips together and placed it behind the heart on a light box.  Then taking a Pigma pen (.5 tip) I traced over the lines and thus got my words in place in a nice font.  Then I heat set the label and hand appliqued it on.  If I had to do it over, I would have put a thin layer of white batting under it so the fabric underneath would not have shown.

BTW:  She loved it!

Design Wall Monday

Made my block lotto blocks for the month - 1/2 yard there. You can see my numbers on the right sidebar. On my wall are same said blocks.  These are the ones for my sampler that Sophie is hosting. At the end of the year we'll have a mod quilt.

What's on your design wall?  I'm linking to Judy's Patchwork Times, Anything Goes Monday, and Lyn's Bom's Away.  Go enjoy the eye candy.

Blogger's Quilt Festival and a Hexie or two...

Today starts Amy's Spring edition of her fabulous Blogger's Quilt Festival!  This is an opportunity to be part of one of the biggest Show and Tell collections on the NET, and there are prizes! Click above or on my sidebar to go visit and see the wonderful entries from quilters all over the world.

I'm entering the latest quilt I've finished - a quilt I was commissioned to make to honor a long time volunteer at the Library.  It's a signature quilt:

Library Volunteer Extraordinaire measures 52" square, so I'll be entering it in the Festival category for Small Quilts.  I designed this in EQ4 (yep, that's all I have) using a roman stripe square and a Jacob's ladder square. I've used this pattern once before for another signature quilt.  You can see it here.  At the Gala when it will presented, guests will have the opportunity to sign the quilt in the white strips.  If there are more than 48 wanting to sign, the writing shows up fine on the green strips also.  I made this with fabric from Connecting Threads collection called Fiesta and designed by Jenni Calo.  Dorothy loves flowers and blue so thought this would please her.

 I quilted the quilt after watching Cindy Needham's Crafsy Class Design it, Quilt it: Free Form Techniques.    It was great and gave me the confidence to do the quilt with more than SITD and stippling. For the most part I used Superior invisible thread on top and Bottom Line/or Invisifil on the back with a 70/10 sharp needle.

I was really worried about what I should do about the center of the quilt and the fabric photo I used of our library. Once again, you quilters in blog land answered my plea for what to do with the floppy fabric after I had stipplied around it. Thank you! You can see more of the quilting on my post of 5/12.

Then I made the label.  I was going to put it on the right back corner, but is seemed to stand out so much, and after consulting with my daughter, decided to place it on the stripe.

Thanks for stopping by.  I hope you consider entering a quilt.  I'd love to see your eye candy! So click on the link after you've read the rest of this post - you might win a prize!

And now for hexies - I do a linky for Hexie Weekends that starts on Fridays. This is to keep me motivated to work on my hexies and see all the goodies other Hexie enthusiasts are working on. Since I've been working on the above quilt for three weeks, I had stopped posting as I regularly do.  Now I can start again!

Here's where I'm at right now:

I'm starting another hexie project using 3/4" hexagons.  They may sound small but the ones I was working on before were 1/2"- LOL.  Don't know what I'm going to do with these yet, but with all your inspiration, I'll think of something.  So do link if you have a hexie project you're working on, have finished, or dream of doing.  Linky below. And for more eye candy overload there is Amanda Jean's finish.

An InLinkz Link-up