A finish!

 

I just finished what ended up to be a class sample for a future trapunto class. I just kind of stumbled into this project. I have been working really hard on my yellow silk project that I wrote about here and here. I was getting burned out. I needed a fun frolic of a project.

I recently took Kathie Wylie‘s excellent Appliquick class and this was my sample that I wrote about here:

My train of thought on my “frolic project”:

• Oh that applique piece would be fun and easy to finish!
• Ooooo, I’ll add a silk border.
• Wellll, wouldn’t it be cool to trapunto it too?
• And I could feather the dickens out of the border, yessss!

Do you see how I can’t seem to keep things simple?

I love trapunto! This was my starting point:

Once I added the trapunto padding, I layered up like normal:

I then echoed around each motif:

Now time to quilt the background. What trauma that was! That background fabric totally caught me by surprise. I love having a grid print for the background because then I can do grid work without marking.

But THIS fabric was not going to allow that. You can’t tell from the photo, but it was soooooo visually distracting that I could not quilt it from the front. I even tried using the printed grid as  my basis for grid work, but my eyes were crossing trying to see beyond the print.

I even tried a high contrast thread color:

Ewwwwww, disaster! I tried different thread weights and colors and tried bubbles, grids and bouncing bananas. None of that worked. BTW, note how lovely that triple stitch of 12 wt cotton is in the bright pink above. I love that!

I took my loss and chose to quilt from the back:

Well that was no bargain either; it was still very difficult to see to quilt on this fabric. Again, it was visually distracting.

No matter what I did, it was not going to show up on the front fabric:

I did have great success with the trapunto:

Oh look at that glorious dimension!

Just to give you a feel how high the trapunto’d part is:

The actual applique I did is nothing to write home about. It was a practice piece and I was not going to angst over perfection. I wanted to experiment, so part of it is hand applique and part is by machine. As to the look, I much prefer hand applique, but I’m not always going to take the time and effort to do that. I AM a fan of the Appliquick method.

I did have ONE corner miter turn out perfect! The others…..not so much.

What you can’t tell from the photos is how the silk border glows! It is such a pretty piece. It is far from perfect yet I am so pleased. What a beautiful class sample. Sometimes it’s fun to just do pretty!

I’ll be linking up with:

Nina-Marie’s Off the Wall Friday
Finished or Not Friday