Hooray for Applique!
Finally a day, a lovely full day to work on the applique for Ribbon & Blooms! I’ve had the template shapes cut for weeks, I’ve even had quite a few of them already pressed to the fabric. But that darned real life kept getting in the way of my quilting!
After about an hour at the ironing board I had the last of the templates pressed to the fabric. Yippie, skippy, it’s time for glue! It was hard not to giggle as I gathered up my scissors, my glue sticks, my gluing mat, the applique shapes and my diet coke and headed out to the patio for some Hand Applique by Machine.
The birds are in full courtship these days. As I trimmed away the extra fabric I enjoyed the raucous chatter of lovesick birds. The baltimore orioles have returned. They are so beautiful, and their song is so confident and charming. Of course I had to drop everything and run back into the house to fill the feeder with orange nectar. No wonder the applique isn’t done yet.
But before long all of the trimming was done and it was, at last, time to glue baste. Each petal of the flowers has this lovely little point, which turned out to be a real bear to baste! Who designed this stupid flower anyway?
My usual method of “mitering” the point was giving me a decidedly unsharp point. No matter how I prodded and pleaded the point would not appear on the front. That would never do.
After some fiddling around, I found that, instead of mitering, if I just turned one edge and 
then overlapped the next I got just the look that I wanted. It’s a small point, and maybe a fine point, but to me it was just the right point for the petal.
Can you see the difference here?
It’s the small details that add up to a special quilt. I enjoy being “in the moment”, allowing each part of the project to be my teacher. Another good lesson learned today.
And tomorrow, it’s time to dock! See you then!