think spring!

this past week's project quilting challenge was to "be inspired by spring." it was also the final project quilting challenge of the year :( i wanted to use this image of swallows in flight (which also happens to be one of my tattoos):

according to the book i got it out of "The Encyclopedia of Signs and Symbols," the image means "new beginnings," which is a perfect theme for spring!

i also wanted to make some flying geese, and looked through my various quilting magazines for some patterns. i lucked out with this copy of quilter's newsletter, which featured this gorgeous flying geese quilt:

there is a pattern for this entire quilt by Linda Cordell Wilkey in the feb/march 2010 quilter's newsletter, but i just used the part for the flying geese border. after i made the border, i enlarged my swallow image to fit on a white patch in the middle, and traced it onto the glue side of fusible web with a sharpie marker. after i had that done, i ironed it on to the white fabric. it didn't turn out quite as dark as i would have liked:

i decided the best way to deal with this would be to add some hand embellishments to the birds. i've been oogling an article in the april/may 2012 issue of quilting arts for a while now, called "extreme embellishment" by a quilter named Karen Loprete (that is a link to her site if you are interested.) here is a picture of one of the quilts i've been admiring, called "joy":

while i knew i wouldn't have time to do anything this intricate in one week, i had many dreams of a heavily embellished quilt square with birds in flight, resembling a kite for spring. well, here's what i got done:

i started off with some beads around the edges of the birds

then stitched around the edges of the birds, and added some "hashmarks" to fill make them blacker.

then i decided each corner needed it's own brightly colored "shisha"mirror. these things are hand-stitched, and boy did they take a LOT of time to do. but i think they look pretty bad-ass, so, completely worth the effort.

but after i did that, and quilted around the flying geese units, i found myself pushing the limits of how late i can stay awake on a saturday night, and the quilt was due the next morning! i went to bed with it about as done as it was going to get, with plans to make and add the binding in the morning before work. well, when i woke up on sunday morning, i realized that i had a BUNCH of stuff to do around the house, AND go to the grocery store, AND spend some quality time with my little two-year-old wild-man, AND show up to work at 3pm. so i just ended up zig-zag stitching around the edges for the binding real quick and submitting it as finished like this:

despite the many dreams i had for a beautiful kite-tail, strings of beads hanging off the edges of the bottom of the quilt, and a much darker image in the middle, i think it turned out pretty well. and i got to have a good time with the little guy AND get all my chores/errands done. oh yeah, and i went to work too :)

here are a few bonus pictures of rowan helping me with this project:

rowan actually took this picture of "mommy's thimble." as far as i know, this is his first photographic endeavour. not too shabby!

little hands with "mommy's thimble"

here he is looking into one of the mirrors. i think he likes it!

and here's the link to all the other amazing entries this week!

that's all for this one, bye bye!