Making Progress

When the weather is nasty and it's too cold--or overcast--to enjoy working outside, it's the perfect time to be in your studio and get some work done.  (Of course, it might also be good to actually organize and put away extraneous things that are also surrounding you as you work, but that's not nearly as much fun).
At any rate, I've made a little more progress on my next art quilt.  I've been playing around with the next step (the black border with the yellow flowers).  This is about the seventh thing that I've tried so far and is my favorite.  We'll see.  There will be more flowers on the side (and there'll be 4 sides) but, for now, I'm just thinking about it.  I made the decision that I was not going to try to finish this quilt for any particular quilt show deadline.  It will be finished when it's finished.  And I'm having more fun with that attitude.

In the meantime, I've been working on a new sample for an appliqué class I'm teaching in May.  The picture on the left is the finished appliqué before I quilted the piece and the other picture is of the finished work.  I don't think that the quilting stitching shows up particularly well but, in person, I do think that it adds life to the appliqué.  The object of this class is to show how to draw out the patterns onto WonderUnder, how to position the fusible pieces onto the background fabrics and how to stitch them down using a blanket or satin stitch.  Even the triangles are fused rather than pieced.  I had a lot of fun coming up with this small quilt and, hopefully, the students will enjoy making it, too.