For Our Kitchen

Steve has encouraged me lately to have some fun with what I work on and wanted me to make a wall-hanging for our house.  So I opted to do something to hang in the kitchen and really wanted to make it country-homey looking.
Out of my head I decided to combine a few different elements to work on some skills at the same time.  I dug around the web and found some things I liked and created a rough 9-block plan in my mind. From Forest Quilting I used a paper piecing pattern for my 4 corner blocks.
Paper piecing can be tedious and fussy, but this worked up pretty easily and I was very pleased with the results.

Then I decided to make an applique block for the center and wanted it to be simple but fitting to our home, so again I turned to the web to find a simple line drawing to use for a template.
I used the freezer paper method to hold things together while I appliqued the apple, leaf & stem and then removed the paper. Nothing fancy, but since I don't do much applique, I was pleased with my efforts.

For my last 4 blocks I wanted to go with a sampler look of traditional pieced blocks and found a few ideas at Quilter's Cache as well as just some standards of the quilty world.

These are what I came up with:

Now for the fun part!  Jess helped me plan the layout and I sashed everything together with a green allover print.

Trying to decide how to quilt it was a challenge as I didn't have much in the way of small scale pantographs to use but I did find one free leaf vine pattern that was just slightly larger than my sashing width.  I like the way it came out sort of overlapping into the edges of the blocks.

Steve hung it in the kitchen for me and I snapped this quick photo with my phone (which is why the lighting and angle is a bit wonky).

All cotton fabrics from my scrap bag and stash, machine pieced, quilted with King Tut thread on my Janome 1600P and New Joy frame. Each block is 6" finished.

Happy sewing!

A stack of sheep

I have a very dear friend... several years ago I saw an adorable wall-hanging that I knew would be perfect for her, so I bought it and began to work on it.  And I worked on it, and I worked on it and I worked on it.  It was the perfect sized project to take on long car trips or work on when I was sitting for a few hours waiting for a child someplace.  But the project took much longer than I'd anticipated.
This month I FINALLY finished it and was able to surprise her with it.

Stacked Sheep wall-hanging

The background is pieced cotton and all the sheep and flowers are wool and are hand-appliqued in layers.  I've never done a project like this before and was very pleased with the over-all look when it was finished.  I hand quilted around the sheep and around the red border then backed the project with a flannel plaid and added a hanging sleeve along the top edge.

She loved her gift and it now hangs in her home so she can remember Psalm 100 every time she sees it.