Monday 2 May 2016

Unplugged: Improv Flowers

One of the things I would like to learn is needle turn appliqué and planned to watch some videos on YouTube over the Easter break. As I said in this post, our WiFi was less than cooperative, so I started on a non-needle turn hand appliqué project instead which I finished today. 

With only scissors and a regular paint stick at hand, I cut freeform pieces from some scraps, pre-creased the folds, and glued them onto a basted background. The background is a piece of a thrifted shirt with a lovely woven pattern.

I only had a few colours of thread, but practise is practise, so I stitched down one shape after the other, quite enjoying the rhythm and watching the shapes take form. Looking at it, I can tell that I got better at tightening the stitches and smoothing the curves as I worked my way through the pieces.

With so much hand work put into it, I wanted to hand quilt it, also something at which I would like to get better. I outlined the appliqué with heavy weight blue thread, and quilted lines on both sides of the basting stitches before removing them.

The quilt was bound with a flowery grey binding from The Big Box of Binding before diving into my button box.

It was rather difficult to restrain myself from adding too many buttons because they all looked great, but I was good, I stuck to the plan only embellishing the flower heads.

I am very happy with the result of my hand appliqué practise, particularly with the improv quality, and will most certainly give hand appliqué another go.

5 comments:

  1. Looks great! you're right, it is all practice!

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  2. Hi Nina Lise! This is super! Beautiful and modern, not too flowery. Lovely idea to leave the threads on the buttons. I make circles for the Quilty 365, but I don't know if it's needle turn - I baste the circles with hard paper and then iron them to get the turned edge. Then I just pin them on their place and sew. Now I start to try if I can make flower stalks with poppana weft. I have lots of them from my mother who used to weave too. Have a lovely week! x Teje
    PS. my new address is www.nerospostbox.wordpress.com

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  3. Amazing! Enjoy seeing the process and your ideas come to life. Thanks for sharing.

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  4. I love it!! This is my favorite kind of quilt-making--scraps, scissors and hand-quilting--just like they did a hundred years ago.

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  5. Herlig blomster eng :-D

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