Homegrown

My finished top of Sue Spargo's 

2018 BOM Homegrown.

Wool and cotton applique on backgrounds of wool

with a zillion embellishment stitches.

The individual house blocks are five inches square.

Sue's designs are all about detail...

The book for Homegrown will be available in September

or October on Sue's website. 

Quiet...

I've been quiet...

I've been doing some serious

stitching and embellishing on

 Sue Spargo's 2018 BOM Homegrown.

It's beyond awesome with the small house

blocks that are heavily embellished.

I'm finally working on the

very, very large flower borders.

Birds, Birds, Birds

 

My Bird Dance is finished...

I machine quilted it and who would have

thought the binding would have been the

hardest part of finishing it. 

It's a very heavy, hot quilt to sit under.

 I need to start finishing wool quilts in

 the winter and not in the hottest part of the summer.

 

 

And then there are other kinds of birds...

 

Western Tanagers...

 

 

And Evening Grosbeaks...

 

 

 

 

More Fresh Cut...

 

Well, I'm still working on the borders so

 I'll share the rest of the blocks for Fresh Cut.

This might be my favorite block...

The Open Buttonhole Filler Stitch is used to stitch that vivid

lime green center of the main flower. 

 

That main stem is made with one of

Sue's signature ribbons.

 

The blocks are stitched together in panels and

in the case of the above block the blue bird that is seen

throughout the quilt is appliqued to that

 gray block and part of it overlaps

 two blocks after the panel is formed. 

 

Still not receiving email notifications from Blogger,

so if you have a question I will check back and answer it here.

 

 

 

 

Fresh Cut

 

My progress of Sue Spargo's 2017 BOM Fresh Cut...

I still need to add the borders.
 

 

A few close-ups of some of the blocks.

 

 

 

 

I absolutely love the bright colors on the black background.

I'll show more blocks when I get the top finished.

Birds, Birds, Birds!

Yay, yay, yay, yay, yay...one more yay!

 

My Bird Dance top is complete...

 



 

A long term project from 2016

as I worked on other projects.

 

Wool and cotton appliques, specialty threads

 for the various embellishment stitches. 

 

Berries...lots and lots of berries.

I'm going to machine quilt it

using the stitch in the ditch technique.

 

One more Yay!



Bird Dance

 

This is where I left off on Bird Dance

back in April...

yikes,

has it been that long.

 

I am finally adding the stems and embellishments to

 each berry and there are 96 of them.

 

I decided to use just one embellishment stitch,

the Fly Stitch on each berry.

 

 

The stems are stitched with the Palestrina Knot

using a Razzle embellishment thread.

Razzle threads have a silky hand

and a beautiful natural sheen.

The thread is not always easy to work with,

 but definitely worth the effort.

Well...

 

Appliquéing those berries took me forever. 

 Now to stitch all the stems and then embellish

  each berry with a specialty thread.

 

Sue Spargo's Bird Dance

 



Bird Dance

 

After lots of measuring, pinning and basting,

I finally finished stitching the applique vine on the borders.

 

Yes, the snow is gone.  I'm waiting to see which of my

wildlife made it through their hibernation...Chipmunks,

Golden-mantled Ground Squirrels and the Marmots.

 

All the wool circles cut for the berries.

I just used freezer paper and cut out all the berries by hand.

The circles are only 1" in diameter so I will use regular

 cotton thread to stitch them to the vine.