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50th Anniversary Wall Quilt - Part 1

Welcome to 2016!

I started this blog in April of 2015 and had 68 posts for the year. I wanted to have a record of what I'd had done all year (minus 3 months) and write about it. The good, the bad and the ugly. And I didn't post as much as a I could simply because I'm not in a race with anyone. Most of my posts were about sewing/quilting, my in-laws 50th Anniversary party, some dog activities and some recipes. I assume 2016 will be much of the same. So let's get to it!

This year, is my parents 50th Anniversary in June but they don't want a party. We have a very small family and they don't have a lot of friends so a party with 15 people is fairly pointless.

So I thought I'd try to make them a keepsake wall quilt type thing. Since I just finished painting my endangered animal quilt, I figured I could paint a picture of them from their wedding day or maybe do a fabric portrait of them. Either one would probably work and I might do both to see which one I like better. I think I'll try painting the picture using coffee instead of inks and I might do a version in crayon/colored pencil and see how it turns out. Ink would work but I had a hard time with the browns. They were not really brown. I had to mix a lot of the different brown colors to get a decent brown for the animal quilt and frankly, I'm tired of mixing colors. I just don't know how well the coffee will work on fabric. Most people paint on paper with it like watercolor. So I should be able to come up with something.

I bought some cream colored fabric and I had some white cotton fabric. I thought I'd use both. I'm concerned about the white dress and head veil. White on white just doesn't show up so I thought about getting some tulle and ironing it to the fabric. I might try that in one of the portraits and see if that works. Might be cool to add.

I cut some pieces of fabric roughly 20x20" and I drew a block 18x18" which is for the portraits of the bride/groom will go. They are now ready for painting or crayons.

I also thought I could have some embroidered blocks around the center fabric portrait. I have the Affairs of the Heart applique design by Aie Rossmann to use on my embroidery machine and I thought I'd try a few blocks from there. You're supposed to use black background and brightly colored fabrics and threads but since this is for a 50th WA, I think I'll use creams and tans and golds instead.

I went through my stash of scraps and found some that I thought would work. I don't have enough cream colored background fabric but I got to experiment. I think they turned out really well. I can see these going around a portrait.





I also did just an outline block. Its just one color of thread and I picked a soft gold color.


I also have the Feathered Star pattern by Hoopsisters. The pattern has some pretty background blocks and I think I might try a few of those.

Next up, is to work on sketching an outline of my parents from a photograph onto fabric.


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