Linda's Bouquet

I had such an amazing trip to Dallas.

The board meeting of the Alliance for American Quilts was super productive and again, I am blown away by the caliber of the people who serve. We have PhD historians, archivists, captains of the quilt industry, writers, media personalities, corporate marketers, and yes, some quilters in our group and the mix is stimulating and so much fun.
We were hosted by Mark Dunn, president and CEO of Moda Fabrics, and were given a complete tour of his facility, where our meetings were held. This was Quilt Heaven, make no mistake about that! He treated us like royalty and is the nicest man you'd ever hope to meet. Barbara Brackman, quilt historian extraordinaire who does the reproduction fabrics for Moda, was on hand and gave us not only a brilliant lecture, but also a very entertaining and myth-busting interview for the Quilters Save Our Stories project, conducted by our board president, Meg Cox.

I took a zillion pictures and plan on posting more about my trip soon....

But it is funny, when I got home I was too wiped out to do that yet. All I wanted to do was make something! So that is what I have done, whipping up a little surprise for my lovely roommate Linda Pumphrey as a thank-you for being so good to me. So this post is about my experiment for her....

I started with my bag of scraps and my Go machine, with the two flower dies, the Rose of Sharon and the Round Flower.

I noticed when she was looking at my book that Linda liked the vintage handkerchiefs pictured on page 82. So I chose one of them for the background of my piece, here shown interfaced and next to my little Go shapes.

I used Glue Baste-It to collage my shapes into place on the handkerchief base. I was able to move them around after I had glued them too, with a slight tug to loosen them.

Once the shapes were laid out, I covered them with tulle (a technique Linda and I had talked about), and layered this top over batting and a thin silk backing. Then I quilted it, the tulle and stitching trapping and fixing my shapes in place.

I quilted around the rose shapes in the handkerchief too.

I added a few more shapes, beads, and some lace trim flowers on top of the tulle. All of this is an experiment, remember...I had no idea how it would all work!

Then I finished the edge in just the same way as for "Soil and Sky"....first zig zagging....

...then trimming, and then zig zagging twice more around the edge.

The back looks kind of cool...but do kindly remember, I have had almost no practice machine quilting in over 10 years!

And here it is finished, about 12" x 12".

It was very fast and spontaneous and a fun way to use those Go shapes. I think the concept has potential and would like to try it again....but I plan on using colored tulle next time instead of white (have to buy some) and piecing the background.
I'm going to have to break down and put more design thought into the quilting too... ;-)

It's good to be home, as there is lots to do between now and the Crazy Quilt Adventure next month!
But a big thank you again to Mark Dunn, the great people at Moda, Barbara Brackman, and my fine fellow board members for a fantastic meeting.