Today is my turn on the La Conner Blog Tour. La Conner is Jera Brandvig's second collection for Lecien fabrics and oh my what a beautiful collection it is! As a quilt shop owner I get to see a lot of fabrics and I love it when there is a story behind a collection...or a collection has a meaning to its designer....... Jera does just that and seems to design from the heart...she talks about La Conner on her blog HERE. When Jera contacted me and asked me to be part of the blog tour to celebrate her fabric release I was absolutely thrilled...and said yes without hesitation.
La Conner is so pretty...the collection is made up of an array of pretty florals, in shades of cranberry (reds), peony (pinks), sage (light green), evergreen (darker green), blueberry (dark blue), wicker (grey/beige) and rain (aqua) and gasp...it also has tiny little hints of metallic. I know metallic...remember those horrible metallics from years ago that made your fabric feel like cardboard..oh how things have changed. La Conner is beautifully soft and a joy to sew with.
For my project, I knew I wanted it to feature lots of hand sewing....hand sewing works for me right now as , I generally do most of my sewing in the evening, when everyone is fed and watered and happy. It works...I sew why Andy watches TV and at least I can be a little bit sociable! Anyway...in my head I envisaged a fabric version of a painted floral wreath... so I set to drawing some applique templates and away I went!
I chose a couple of pretty blenders to compliment the La Conner fabrics...a delicate cream on cream pin dot from Kate Greenaway and a dainty dot in a lush raspberry pink from the Quilters Basics collection..both by Lecien. For the flowers I used a mix of applique techniques....for the light and dark blue ones, I used the interfacing method...(LIKE THIS) ...for the centre circles I used Sarah Fielke's cardboard and foil applique technique and for the little red flowers and bow I needle turned, using the freezer paper technique that Atsuko Matsuyama recommends in HER BOOK.
Thread wise, I used a mix of Aurifil 50wt and 80wt (80wt is so super fine, your stitches are almost invisible!) #5007 #5020 #1128 #2260 #2311 you can also see my favourite teeny tiny Clover Applique Pins!
Of course I decided to hand quilt the mini...
Originally I had planned on straight line quilting outside the wreath...the lines were marked using my Hera Marker at 1" spacing and then simply outlining the flowers. But for days I just kept looking at it..it didn't seem finished....
I went ahead and added the flange edging....I wanted it to look like a mount inside a frame...and the binding and I still kept looking at it and then earlier this week, I had a light bulb moment and started to add some shadow quilting......
and just get going until the centre of the wreath was full....much better!
If you feel inspired to make your own pretty floral wreath, you can download the FREE Applique Flower Templates HERE.
See you again tomorrow, for the first instalment of the Advent Calendar A Little Happy Sew Along!
Beautiful! Your stitching adds so much to this little quilt. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThis is beautiful Sarah the hand quilting is amazing it adds so much I can't stop looking at the shadow quilting in the middle it's very clever thanks for sharing xxx
ReplyDeleteI really like your beautiful wreath. Thank you for sharing your templates.
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