small lady quilts revisited

After teaching the class on chop and drop applique, one of my students showed me how she decorated the left side of her quilts with motifs.  It got me thinking about doing some kind of embellishment on 2 of the quilts that I had finished.

I have been pinning things on Pinterest for years, and some of the things that I save are humorous quotes.  I pulled out a couple of them, typed them up in Word and enlarged them in the font and size that I needed for these quilts.  Then I picked a background color that went with the quilts.  The Word document was then printed on HQ printables photo paper, which is prepared for printing fabric that goes through the inkjet printer.  After the ink dried, I adhered steam-a-seam to the back and fused the sayings onto the left side of my art quilts.

A friend came to visit and suggested that I add black buttonhole stitching to the outside of the sayings to permanently adhere them to the quilts.  I used stitch #1309 on the Bernina, and set the width to 1.6 and the length to 2.3.  It was just the perfect finish to these quilts.

Here's a close up of the stitching:

And the finished, revised quilts

I hope you like how I revisited these pieces with ideas from 2 other quilters!  I certainly do!

Northwest Garden Lady - Part 2

This is a continuation of a previous post about the making of the Northwest Garden Lady art quilt.  I take tons of pictures of plants in my garden and wanted to use some of my own photos for the flowers and foliage to give it a Northwest feeling.  Here are some of the pictures that I used.  They include zinnias, chrysanthemums, hellebores, Japanese anemones, coneflowers, and feverfew.  

All of the pictures were sized to the right scale in Photoshop and printed onto EQ Printables Photo fabric sheets.  They were fused to the background, along with fabric leaves. 

I also love our strawberry tree and made the tree out of more pictures.

I made the face, wine glass and glove out of fabric pieces and added Steam-A-Seam to the back, so that they can also be fused to the background.   Here's a progress picture.

So far, so good.