Here are the quilts side by side you you can see what changes I made to the pattern-not necessarily an improvement but just more me since I was the one making the quilt.
The first change you will notice is that I used just one yellow for the background. I could see the advantage of user darker shades as there are some light colored vases which show up better against a darker yellow. The second main change is the border treatment. I did not like the odd greenery growing out of the vases so I added a (to me) cleaner lined oriental filigree shape. Flowers are growing out of my vases.
Maggie's pattern does not limit itself to just oriental blue pottery but also includes A couple English teapots and a country pitcher. I googled oriental pottery to seek out some oriental shapes and replaced about 6 of the pattern pots with ones of my design.
In my search for fabrics, I could not always find what I wanted. For instance I wanted a dragon fabric and also a stork fabric. Being unable to find these in one fabric, I combined two fabrics and appliqued the shapes I wanted to the vase fabric.
The Chinese greenery and the stork are broderie perse against the plain blue vase. In the photo below, the dragon was taken from some fabric I had on hand and I designed some little squiggles, and added the trim.
The little pot to the left is a lidded Chinese teacup, one of the googled shapes as is the dragon pot.
I rearranged the upper part of the stems and leaves and moved the fruit around because I did not like the apple just sitting there on a branch. The blue lotus flower pot is also a shaped I googled. This was where the country pitcher sat and I wanted an all oriental pottery look.
To carry on the consistency of oriental pottery motifs, I changed the fan that Maggie placed at the top of her quilt with a rice bowl and cherry blossoms made of little hexagons.
One fun happenstance was the lid on the blue and white floral pot on the bottom left. I found a fabric with lots of mingled, overlapping Chinese pots but was able to pull out the lid having a Chinese lion as a handle and made the little floral pot to fit it. That little pot is composed of 2 fabric but looks like one.
The last photo is a pot decorated with a sashiko embroidery design of maple leaves. Quilts give us all a chance to try out techniques about which we are curious.
So that is a blast from the past. I loved collecting fabric for this quilt and making it. It was a long search to find fabric which seemed appropriate and I find I am stilling looking at blue and white fabric for that perfect pot.
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Sweet Surrender was not neglected this week but not having my Juki really put me at odds with myself. I made the 4 half triangle corner flowered appliques so that's progress. The main event this week was the exploration of foundation piecing. I watched a couple of you tube videos and got started. It is trickier than it looks and requires some practice. I still am not sure if I am doing it right.
I ended up piecing in rows. That is the first row of 4 diamonds and a triangle was one foundation piece. The second foundation piece was the next row of 3 diamonds and a triangle....etc. The I pieced the 4 sections together.
HERE IS MY QUESTION: is it possible to make a shape such as this without breaking it down into sections? Someone tell me...(Gretchen?)
Here is the right side. Aside from the blurry photo, you can see it all came together well. Apparently, before rotary cutters and mats and modern rulers, a lot of pieced quilts were made using this method.
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That's all the news that fit to print for this week. I have not heard from Sewingmachinesplus about my Juki but their allotted 3-7 days to repair the juki will not be up until Thursday so they still are preserving their A+ rating.
On Tuesday, election day, we are going straight to netflix without one glance at election news. We will find out Wednesday morning what the future will be.
HAPPY QUILTING!
I am linking up with my old favorites. You can click on any of the buttons on the left to go to their link ups and see pretty quilts and interesting ideas.
