Colour!

I love colour - my kitchen is bright red, I love wearing bright jewel tones - my closet contains a lot of red and apple greens, with more turquoise blue sneaking in. I'm very drawn to bright and colourful quilts.  But my stash, overall, it's not quite so bright.  For some reason, over the years as I've bought fabric, I've not bought a lot of pure colour - it strikes me as very strange, as I don't really like the greyed out colours, (and I'm not a pastels person, so there aren't a lot of them in my stash).  I do have a pretty broad selection of batiks, mostly FQ but bright, pure or solid colours?  Not so much!  I'm gonna have to do something about that when my Fabric diet is over! But I do have a few colourful pieces.  And I dug them out to work on this sample for a guild workshop I'm doing.  The workshop is on applique, eight of us are showing different applique methods, and I'm demonstrating how I do raw edge applique.

fused on

This is the basic sample that all 8 of us will be making, using our own technique.  A vase with flowers - we each designed a flower and shared it with each other, and then its up to us how we combine them, embellish them etc. with the idea being to show how the same basic pattern can look very different, depending on technique, layout, colour selection and finishing, if we get that far!  It also will let the participants see several different methods, get to try them all out, and see which one they like best.
I like raw edge as I can combine it with trapunto

trapunto layer added

and can also use the stitching down as being some of the quilting, although for this demo I'll be doing them separately.  You can be subtle or bold with your applique thread - this time I picked black as I wanted that kind of look, but I could easily have picked colours that blended with each item.
So tonight I've finished stitching on and trimming away the excess batting for a trapunto layer.  Next step will be t sandwich it and quilt - I'm thinking of doing some pretty dense quilting on it, incorporating a few colours around the flowers, but we'll see how I feel when I get there!

It will have to wait until the weekend now, as I have a different guild meeting tomorrow night - the Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild - where our January challenge was to make ourselves nametags.  This is what I came up with

I used paperpiecing to do the curved flying geese this time - here's the nametag beside a bobbin so you can get an idea of the size of the geese

This was a lot of fun!

As far as my DQS10 quilt - I've got a of couple ideas perculating - hope to get some sketches done soon and some pictures posted.  If my secret partner is here doing any stalking, please please have fun! - do not stress or worry - I have very eclectic tastes, and love to try out all kinds of new things - but I keep very little of what I make for myself!  So please just enjoy the process and make something that you love making!
Happy quilting!