Sweet Land of Liberty Month 3

Here are both halves ...the entire width won't fit in my camera's view.

The project for month three is mostly applique and adding embellishments to the already sewn pieces.  I dipped into my vintage sewing supplies for a quarter inch wide seam tape and buttons for the branch and berries.  As always, the birds, stars and lettering are drawn freehand.  I find it very interesting that something which looks fine in a rough draft or on graph paper looks completely different in fabric!  Once I cut the green birds and placed them, I thought they looked like lizards. After some adjustment, they do look a little more like birds.

If you aren't familiar with this sew along, it's being run by Lori at Humble Quilts.  This is based on a Cheri Payne quilt and there is no pattern currently available.  Lori gives us block dimensions and photos of what she and Denise have made and then we copy and/or change things as we see fit.

 I see that I lost a letter on the trip from my livingroom to the front porch.  The handwork on attaching alll the letters will probably take me the rest of the month!

Linking withBusy Hands Quilts and  Crazy Mom Quilts

Quilty 365 Progress

Very, very slow progress but progress nonetheless!  It took me ages to get the side borders on this.  For some reason, the bright pink fabric on the narrow border grew about two inches as I joined the two borders leaving the yellow border short. They weren't cut on the bias and the seams were all pressed before sewing...it's a mystery!   After checking out several options and realizing I was going to have to put a seam in somewhere, I just added to the ends.  Hopefully, I'll be able to make that seam look like a line of quilting.

I've decided to hand quilt this..I've never done and this seems to be a good one to start with...all those circles!  It's been a while since I've done any hand stitching so we'll see how it goes.  After I quilt the body, I'll add the remainder of my circles and half circles to the outer edge.  The plan is to have them facing inward on all sides.  This started out as a six months record of my circles but it is taking all the remainder for the borders, so I'll have the year in one spot!

I see that some of my letters need to be repositioned and the year needs some adjustment also...

Linking with Em's Scrapbag, Monday Making

Sweet Land of Liberty

The two panels and the stars are the February blocks for the sew along.  I'm kind of late with these....I had most of it finished by the end of the first week in of the month then spent the rest of my time thinking and procrastinating on the flying geese!  It's a case of I love the geese but they don't love me!  I always seem to have points cut off somewhere....I'd love to do one of those quilts that's all geese...but not yet.

There is no pattern given for this quilt.  Lori posts the month's project on her blog Humble Quilts then we all copy it or find patterns as best we can.  This has turned out to be quite fun.  I did try tracing the eagle from the computer screen but couldn't get the size quite right.  I do have a couple of tries that looked more like a bat but I'm happy with my final result.  The same with the angel...I finally got a wing that I was happy with.

Choosing the fabrics has been an adventure...most of my stash (which is mostly scraps now) are modern prints that I didn't really like with the primitive look of the quilt.  There is a little of every thing in this...a couple of strips from an old French General Christmas collection and men's shirts make up the majority.  The tan background of the angel is from a length of apparel fabric that I got as a mistake with an order years ago.  The pale yellow background for the house block is the wrong side of a very, very bright print and most everything else is from the scrap bags.

Here they are together, with some of the March done.  I still have all the little bits of March to do...there is a vine in the blank blue strip, lots of birds and lettering still to go. Now I need to sit down and do lots of embroidery on this!  This is all together in one piece but too long to fit in my camera's view.

Linking with Humble Quilts, Oh Scrap, and Em's Scrapbag