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!

Pansy Quilt Top Done

The Pansy quilt top is done! It's nice to have this WIP reach the halfway point. This is one of those projects that spent a year or two languishing before I got organized.


(Sorry, I can't take a picture without Charley doing his Vanna White routine.)

The majority of the blocks came from a swap organized on the RTCQ newsgroup. It was called the "Your Pick" swap because we each selected our own focus fabric--mine being the pansy fabric. Then we cut 12" squares of our fabric, and sent one square to each of the other participants. We received beautiful blocks back in return. How cool is that?

In my opinion, block swaps are a lot of fun because the swaps have often forced me to work with other colors and fabrics that might not be my first choice, thereby stretching my quilting skills, and I receive blocks back that I wouldn't have made myself. For example, I received a couple of lovely appliqued blocks for the pansy quilt. Applique really isn't a part of my quilting repertoire yet, but nevertheless, I'm now lucky enough to be able to include it on this quilt.

Even after I got focused on the pansy quilt, it took me a long time to finish the top. I decided to do the pieced butterfly border. There are 52 six inch butterfly blocks on this top. These border blocks proved to be more work than the rest of the quilt! I've often admired pieced borders, and wondered why they aren't used more often. Now I know. Still I am very pleased with how the border looks on my bed.



I'll be linking up over at Amylouwho's for Sew and Tell Friday. Be sure to check out everybody else's lovely work.