The Blues - Finishing a Project

 I had a great Easter weekend. And one of the things that made it great was finishing up another project and getting it to the point where I could put it on the wall. The problem with perfectionism is that you tend to think that you can't just declare something good enough and display it. I'm working on that.


On Saturday, I finished working on two small art quilt pieces I'm calling The Blues, because the background is a blue/green mottled fabric. I took a class on Craftsy.com called Stupendous Stitches. I like taking classes there because you can take them on your own schedule, and because you can go back and watch parts of the class as your own projects get to specific places. I've got a bunch of classes, several of which I haven't finished, but I did finish this one, and worked the project, and a couple of others as well. I'll get to the other projects when I get to them. 

So here are some pictures to show what I got out of the process that was taught in the class. You start out by using a couching foot to couch down fibers. I used rat tail cord, and doubled floss, and some pearl cotton embroidery thread.

The next step is to use the decorative stitches on your sewing machine in between the couched lines. Then I did hand embroidery with pearl cotton. And finally, when the backing and additional stiffening were added, I machine quilted them You can just barely see the quilting in the photos if you look hard.

I zigzagged all around them twice to finish them off.

These pieces are literally stiff as a board because of the interfacing and fusible fleece in them so they were stiff enough to sew a hanging hook on the back and put them up on the wall.
 

These two small pieces were so much fun to do that I'm beginning another, based on this class and one of the other classes, Art Quilting 101, that will be my own design totally, and which will combine the two processes.
 
The Rime Quilt is now hanging above my bed. It took 19 years to finish this quilt. The binding got done because of yet another Craftsy.com class where I learned how to bind and finish a quilt up. It might not have gotten finished without that class.

And now I'm declaring the project of this post as finished, and I'm putting it out there.

Take care all.