Alyssa’s Flower Power

Honest, I haven’t left the country.  I’m still recovering from being sick.  Just when I think I might be feeling better, I’m saddled in bed with a fever.  Saturday I worked at the shop.  I was extraordinarily cold it seemed.  I kept jokingly telling Karen, the shop owner, she was freezing me.  I even sat outside in the sun to warm up! LOL!  Well, by the time I got home, I was feeling super cold.  I actually put a hooded sweatshirt on, with the hood on my head and velour pants because I was so cold.  Indeed, I was running a fever.  I mean, really????  So back to the doctor I go today.  I’m sure he is going to tell me that I didn’t rest enough, burning the candle at both ends…something along those lines.  I’m sure that’s part of it, but there was a mix up with my prescription to begin with and I think the one I took didn’t do squat for me.  It’s just so hard to rest when I have so much to do.  Typically, I try to quilt for a while, rest a bit and quilt some more.  We leave for our family vacation Friday.  We take a vacation every year during the same week.  Hopefully, I can rest some on our trip!!  Yeah, right. 

So I thought I would share a quilt I made for Alyssa.  It’s a quilt that incorporates the “snail’s trails” block.  I quilted a client quilt recently with the same block.  I posted it here.  I made this about 3 yrs ago.  It’s one of my earliest quilts.   

Yes, Scooter couldn’t stand to not be in the photos as well.  This was literally the fourth time I removed him only to have him lay right back down again.  I just gave up.  🙂  Alyssa wanted bright colors and flowers.  She helped pick the pattern with me and off we went fabric shopping.  I free-motion quilted it on my little Janome 6600.  I used Quilter’s Dream Cotton batting.

 I traced the the above flower design on Golden Threads paper and stitched following the lines.  I hated every second of it.  I just didn’t enjoy it.  I couldn’t wait to get them all done.  I think that’s when I realized that I probably wouldn’t enjoy following a pantograph on a longarm some day.  That’s probably why I have yet to try one still on Annie.  Maybe some day…

It’s fun to look back and see how far my quilting has come!  I remember being so proud of how I quilted the border.  All just freehand.  This has been a well loved quilt!  I appliqued the flowers with a satin stitch.  I’m not usually a fan of the satin stitch, but the fabric was chenille and that seemed to work best.

The back.

I bet you can guess who the lump is under the quilt. 🙂

The quilt is a design by Tammy Tadd.  She had some really cute designs for girls.

One thing I know I will be doing on vacation, catching up on my emails.  I just found a bunch of legitimate emails that were in my spam box.  Grrrr!!!

Hope everyone has a great week!