Zinna and Iris

It's been a week of reworking quilts or sample workshop pieces. I need to get some new pieces ready for an exhibit I have coming up in April. I've been going through what I have, what I have in progress and what I need to get done before April. the quilt to the left was made several years ago and while I posted it on my blog and web site I never showed it anywhere.

I was never really happy with the piece because I had not done a good job on the quilting. I bit the bullet this past week, removed the facing and started reworking the quilting.

The top photo is the reworked piece with the one under this sentence the old piece.  

I had quilted iris and iris leaves in the background just as an outline. I did no quilting in between. The iris was minimally quilted. I added quite a bit more to the iris giving it more definition.   I then did a lot of meander quilting between the outline of the iris and leaves. It's hard to see here but if you enlarge the photos it is very obvious. I was much happier with the piece and will add it to my exhibit.

When I teach a class I always do a demo. This is a piece I started at one of my J. C. Campbell Folk School classes several years ago. I didn't like it there was not enough color variation in the petals and I didn't like the center. Therefore I never did anything with the piece.

This is the piece after I changed some of the petals and the center. I'm liking it much better. Now I have to find the right background.

Backgrounds are so important to a piece. If I can't get anything else across to my students in class I hope that this bit of information sticks.

After auditioning many pieces for the background this is the one that fit the bill.

  I still have quite a bit of quilting to do on the petals and haven't even started the background yet but I'm  quite pleased with this piece.

Lots of traveling next week so don't expect to get much done but I'm back to it SASP.

This post is linked to www.ninamariesayre.blogspot.com