Book Giveaway: Day Number Three

(My apologies for the camera flash on the book cover.)

For today's book giveaway, I offer Applique 12 Easy Ways by Elly Sienkiewicz.  From the back cover:  Applique 12 Easy Ways teaches you how to do hand applique simply.  Great drawings show exactly how it's done.  Even a beginner can make the small cover quilt, "You've Stolen My Heart".  As you sew, you'll learn a lifetime of applique skills in just a few evenings.  See your points, curves, and corners improve, heart by heart.

I do have an interest in applique.  In fact doing an applique wall-hanging is on my bucket list.  However, I have a feeling I need to move the applique project to my "maybe, someday" list.  I keep finding other projects to do instead.  Seeing that I'm really not progressing toward any applique project very quickly, I've decided I need to let this book go on to someone who may get some use out of it--or at least pretend they will as I have.

If you're interested in winning this book leave a comment.  (Or if you're not interested, but want to comment anyway, just leave a note in your message saying you're not interested.)

And if you're just now coming to the eight days of book giveaways, it's not too late to check out the books from Day Number One and Day Number Two.  Just comment in order to be placed in the drawing.  The giveaways will close at noon on September 7th and winners will be announced September 8th.

Dresden Plate Wall-hanging

Some of you may remember that in May of this year, P. from The Way I Sew It, gave me the beautiful Dresden Plate that is now centered in the middle of this medallion wall-hanging top. I was pretty excited about receiving it and blogged about it here. On July the 4th, I finally came up with a plan to showcase the Dresden in a wall-hanging.  I am pleased to say that while it took me about 6 weeks to mull over how best to show off its beauty, the execution of the plan took less than a month.  That's a record for me!  (Hanging out with all you quilty bloggers has made me more organized.) True, it still needs to be quilted, but I am going to wait to do that until I've honed my free motion machine quilting skills just a bit more--or decide to hand-quilt it.

I used a textured black for the main body of the wallhanging. (If you click to make the pictures larger, the texture is more apparent.) The entire wall-hanging measures 24".  I debated about making it larger, but I wanted the borders to complement the Dresden Plate; not overwhelm it.  So I stopped at just two borders.  The inner pink-lavender border (Kona calls the color "Petunia") is only a 1/2 inch wide.  I'll admit that making the border so narrow gave me pause.  Instead of rotary cutting it as I ordinarily would for a wider border, I drew it out with pencil on the fabric and cut it out with scissors.

In order to sew accurately, I marked my 1/4 inch seam lines as well.  I was pleased with the result.

Finally, I added the ribbon border.  The instructions are from Quilter's Cache.  (She has lots of other border ideas on the site as well.)

The very last step was to hand-applique the Dresden to the wall-hanging.

I'll be linking up at one or more of the Friday Linky Parties shown in my sidebar.  There are always talented people sharing their latest creations at these Linky Parties, so be sure to check them out. You won't be disappointed!