Progress on Love Entwined

Hello all you "The More The Merrier" quilters and you "One At A Time" quilters. It certainly looks like the majority prefers to have more than one project on the go at the same time! I have to admit that finishing a project is a wonderful feeling so I do admire the "One At A Timers" for that reason. But the feeling of excitement when I start a new project has so much allure, even more than finishing a project. What I have to say is that I am a firm believer in doing what works for you and what gives you both pleasure and a sense of accomplishment. And I am unanimous in that!

I have been working away on Love Entwined (LE) and it is so exciting pulling fabrics and experimenting! The pie wedge border is all stitched down so the next step is to add the ten little posies in between every other wedge of pie.  I am using The Bottom Line thread by Superior to stitch everything down. This fine thread just melts into the fabric and almost disappears. You can also see the flower I stitched down. There will be eight of them around the centre and another four at the edges. There'll be a little more about that later.

I love green and have tons of different green fabrics. How's a quilter to decide when there are so many choices? I decided to use five different greens!

Here the leaves are all stitched down. There are little stems and I will embroider them with a chain stitch with three strands of green floss rather than appliquéd stems.

The next step is the posies. I narrowed it down to two choices, both of which are fussy cut. The first is a little pink flower (this one is just rough cut from the fabric).

My second option is to repeat the circles in the compass.

I decided to go with the little pink flower so here it is stitched down.

Now back to those six petal flowers. Some people can get lots of points matching neatly in the centre and I could do that with back basting appliqué but I just didn't feel like doing that and as a result the points are not going to meet perfectly in the centre.

There is a solution to this problem! On May 24 I wrote about one of my Mom's first Africa quilts. She hand quilted the piece but there were a couple of small puckers. Her solution was to appliqué killer bees over the mistakes.

Killer bee covering a mistake

They looked so good that she added many more so that they looked intentional rather than being used to mask a mistake. The killer bees were the perfect finishing touch to her quilt! They add pizzazz!

Extra killer bee chasing the rhino right off the quilt!

What Mom taught me is that when you have a mistake that can't be fixed (or that you can't be bothered to fix) cover it up with something interesting! And that is exactly what I decided to do with these six petal flowers. There were three options that I was considering: a pink flower (on the right), the circles that I used in the compass (in the centre) or the circles I used in the compass only they are a little larger so that there is a cream border (on the left). I decided to go with the third option since I was going to use the pink flowers for the little posies between the pie wedges.

So as of this morning here is where LE stands!

The six petal flowers are made of pinks and reds and I threw in the odd bit of orange for a little pizzazz (I'm big on pizzazz).

The next step is to add a zigzag border and then I'll fill in the space between the centre and the border. That is going to involve a lot of work so I had better get cracking!

Until I post again, hope you get cracking too!