SAL & Crazy Quilt Week One Class Progress

Town Square SAL: Monsterbubble's Jail. I put in a few hours on this each of the past three days ... even made it my "travel" piece by switching to a larger stitching bag capable of accomodating the doodler lap frame. As you can see, I still need to fill in the central arch and the taller tower with WDW Dolphin and then I have to back-stitch the outlines of the granite blocks in WDW Charcoal. I'd like to work on this till it's finished since I have received all the luscious Crescent Colors for the next piece in this series that I intend to stitch: the Town Square Saloon [designed by Crescent Colors, of course] ... and am itching to work on something a touch more colorful than all this grey. By the way, the piece is not really crooked, I must have loaded the scrolls slightly off kilter to give it that sadly askew look.

As for my Online Class, Encrusted Crazy Quilt Block: I have completed the Week 1 assignment which was piecing the block. I used a red tartan Duponi silk, a black watered silk moire, a black cotton, an ivory cotton with a very faint tone-on-tone floral pattern, a red cotton with a bleeding color effect and two different yellow-gold cotton prints. The yellow gold and red cottons pick up colors in the tartan though that may be difficult to see given the quality of my photography. In the first photo, it looks more like Modern Art because of the bold colors and the sharp edged shapes. In the second photo, I have laid out and cut [but not yet sewn] the lace and cording embellishments. I have used a variety of laces, including a heavy weight, white, wide grape and leaf lace, two much lighter, narrower, white cotton machine-crocheted laces and one tan lace that has a hand crocheted look as well as some black velvet cording. The next step is to tack down all the laces prepatory to the surface embroidery embellishment of the seams. As the block is embellished and "encrusted" it will take on more of a Victorian crazy quilt look. The Week 2 lesson has been down-loaded and I have begun studying it ... now the fun begins. There are so many surface embroidery stitches to be explored as a means of embellishing the block. I am going to work up a band sampler using the sew and flip crazy quilt technique so I can experiment with some of the stitches on real seams before working on my block. I'll be photographing the whole process for future posts.