When the MQG announced last fall that a global mini-quilt swap was being organized, I tried to convince myself to sit it out. Swaps and challenges have a sneaky way of consuming far too much of my quilty time, and it’s not like my WIP/UFO piles have been shrinking at any great rate lately. Even so, I caved and said yes to this one.
And I’m glad I did. My secret swap partner cited Anna Maria Horner as a top love, and included an applique project in her inspiration mosaic on Instagram, so I decided to head in that direction. There’s not much more than a few crumbs of AMH in the stash right now (something I’d love to remedy, but stash space and fabric budget are currently close to or beyond maxed out). So I decided to make an applique mini “in the style of.” It’s about 17″x17″:
The stems are part of the pieced background. The rest is needle-turn applique, which is one of my favorite things. It’s much faster than you might think if you’ve never tried it. Some folks think fused, raw-edge, machine applique is the way to go, but honestly, I’m not sure it’s all that much faster or easier by the time you’ve fussed with prepping and fusing and all that.
Couldn’t resist adding a wee bit of perle-cotton detailing in the flower centers:
And a couple of leaves needed little chain-stitch stems:
I do draw the line at hand-quilting, most of the time. It takes for-frickin’-ever, just when you really want to plow ahead and call the project done. I don’t know why I find it so much more tedious than applique, but I do. And honestly, there’s a limit to how much time I want to put into a swap project. Some quick machine echo lines wrapped this up expeditiously.
Many stash options were auditioned for binding, but sometimes only a stripe will do. This one has convinced me that there are not nearly enough stripes in the stash. We’ll put that on the “to be remedied one of these days” list.
