Design Wall Monday - December 17, 2012

Wow! It's been a whole week since there has been a post on this blog. So sorry, but business first you know.

Work is progressing on the Baltimore Christmas quilt. The pieces for the borders are in the prepping stage. I've linked to the designer's page so you can see the border.

 This is the counter in the sewing studio. Working from the back of the photo you can see

• the desktop Ottlight for obvious reasons
• the empty envelopes, recycled from bills, that are used to hold the applique pieces cut from the stabilizer
• a bottle of Elmer's school glue used to glue the applique pieces onto the background
• a stack of coffee filters used as catch alls and can be stacked on top of each other
• a beautiful pot used for holding pens and pencils
• the 3-ring notebook with the pattern
• the last envelope with the prepped stars for the border
• a piece of glass with blue taped wrapped edges for putting on top of the glued applique while the glue dries
• two 3-lb purple hand weights to put on top of the glass for added weight
• 2 pair of paper scissors (very important! only for paper)
• a coffee filter filled with 48 1.5" red fabric circles, a needle and the thread all ready to gather for use as the berries in the border
  
• the stabilizer with the holly leaves ready for cutting.
  Tip: The leaves at the very bottom of the photo were traced from the pattern and then scanned into CorelDraw. Once in the drawing package the bitmap was traced to turn it into a vector drawing so they could be edited. Then the line weight was changed to hairline and the color from black to lavender. A total of 64 leaves, 32 pointing left and 32 pointing right) were needed so I plopped the leaves in pairs, 6 to a page, and printed 10 pages of holly leaves onto stabilizer. The lavender ink is so faint that when the quilt is washed it won't even show if it DOES run. But because it is so faint, I use one of the FriXion pens to trace the image because the black lines will disappear when it gets heated with an iron.
• and the most recent AAQI Priority Quilt finish: notice the dimension to the butterfly?

And on the ACTUAL design wall is the next AAQI Priority Quilt. This is the last section of a vintage printed panel that is being embroidered. For the most part, the stems and leaves are done except for the grass on the left. The daisies have been embroidered using silk ribbon and the blue flower started but I ran out of the blue. The pinks will be done later along with the yellows. I think I will hand quilt this one since it will have a lot of dimension to it.

I'm linking up to  Judy's blog, PatchworkTimes for design wall and BOMs Away Monday.