May ALYoF Goal - Applique Flowered Borders

When making quilts for the Faith Circle of do. Good Stitches I find the quilt top usually needs to have borders added in order to be larger than just a small lap quilt. I like the finished quilt to be at least a throw size - covering the top of a bed, but not as large as a twin quilt.

I am currently in the process of assembling the March Wonky Disappearing 4 Patch quilt for our bee. The blocks are joined and are ready for borders...fun, flowering borders!

A couple years ago I purchased The New Applique Sampler by Piece O' Cake Designs. I highly recommend this book if you would like to learn needle turn applique...and you should because it's great fun!! This book contains patterns for fresh, whimsical flowers and I know they will be perfect for this quilt. However, I am going to use raw edge applique (fuse the applique pieces to the border fabric and machine stitch the edges.) 


 


So far I've cut out and fused down the flowering vine applique for one side of the quilt. It still needs to be machine stitched down.

My May "A Lovely Year of Finishes" goal is to complete the border for all four sides and attach them to the quilt top. I am linking to the May ALYoF Goal Party. I am entry No. 33!

In a previous post I showed the beautiful Wonky Disappearing 4 Patch blocks made by the sweet ladies of the Faith Circle. Here they are joined together:

I am really liking the softness of the these colors! My bee-mates chose such pretty fabrics :o) Can't you just picture how fun this is going to look encircled by a border of sweet, whimsical flowers?

Planning a Sampler

This Fall I enrolled in The Penny Sampler online class taught by the talented Rachel of Stitched in Color. The main class project is a beautifully designed Scandinavian sampler quilt which Rachel named, "The Penny Sampler." The class focuses on developing skills in three areas:

• machine applique
• precise piecing
• machine paper piecing

Rachel teaches these skills through mini stand-alone projects. The first skill we are working on is machine applique with various techniques to choose from. 

I chose to try the stitch and flip method to create my dogwood petals and then use sketch stitch applique to attach them to my quilted-in-advance background fabric. I seem to be on a grid-quilting roll lately...really like the look of it. It is super fun to sketch stitch! I think I've found something I will continue to enjoy and will add variety to my quilting skills :o) I ended up using my darning foot and free-motion quilting for the sketch stitching. I love the "slightly" messy look of it...so freeing! (Note: this is a stand along project...not part of the Penny Sampler quilt top. It can be used as the front of a pillow, although I may just set this aside for now and try making a quilt-as-you-go mini medallion quilt with it.)

I used three online color palette builders to help me select the colors for my Penny Sampler quilt top. The photo I used for my inspiration is not mine so I'll not post it for public viewing. However, I will show you the rich, beautiful colors that resulted from it!


I am really loving these colors! Deep, dark chocolate browns, teal (this word does not even need any adjectives...it's super all by itself!) rich eggplant purples blending into lively magenta's, mustard yellows, and creamy neutrals. Sounds good enough to eat!

Rachel provided us with a black-line master of the quilt top so we can color it in to help balance out the use of color across the quilt.


Clearly I need more depth to the variety of shades in my colored pencils :o) I just have basic colors so the shades don't match up too well with my fabrics, but I do get an idea where I want to put my main colors. 

This is going to be a fun Fall! Hope you have a great Labor Day weekend~I'm off to work on my next class assignments :o)