The Top is Done and So Am I!

This small piece was the original piece I did using this drawing. It was appliqued onto a hand dyed piece of brown. I think this newer version below is a lot more vibrant than the original. If you look closely, you can see some of the actual changes in the drawing as well!


Well, the groups of pieces went together just fine but getting the piece finally put together was not pretty at all... I may have made one change too many or one too many Y-seams but many seams were stitched and re-stitched and it still doesn't sit as flat as my pelican did. I am hoping that quilting will bring the piece back into line!

The piece measures about 36 inches by 42 inches right now. It uses some of my marbled and hand dyed fabric as well as commercial fabrics. Who knows how big it will be after I do the "real" cropping.

I am relatively pleased with how the piece looks now that it is done. I re-pieced several parts completely that I had already done so that took extra time. I HATE undoing stitching and redoing it but I wanted this to look how I envisioned it so there was much restitching!

In my defense, I must say that I did the drawings for this piece long, long before I took the Ruth McDowell class and didn't redo some of them until I was into the piecing. The changes I made won't be obvious to most but made me happier! These involved basically undoing leaves that I had finished piecing. Instead of using two or three prints in a leaf, I decided to piece the leaves so that there were many greens making them up. Now, this is NOT what the leaves looked like but I did maintain the shape!! I also took out several of the leaves that were in the original drawing, taped them back together and made background instead adding stems where appropriate.

As everything else around here, we have a free-spirited "Christmas" cactus and I use that term loosely as it has never bloomed for us on Christmas but this year came the closest so we didn't have to call it an Easter cactus or Memorial Day cactus -- this year it is a Chinese New Year's cactus. It certainly is filled with blossoms though!! I am thinking that it has a hippie karma left from my youngest daughter!