Heartful

I often make combination fabric and paper cards for special occasions like the one above for my son's birthday today. I also returned to 'Follow Your Heart', completing hand stitching the binding, doing stitch in the ditch, and then I noticed the central heart was a bit wrinkled and flat, so I decided to partially remove it and stuff it trapunto style, before re-sewing it back down. It looks so much more 'heart-full' now. I also noticed a few more areas in the quilted hearts that needed redoing - which I did - and I expermented on a sample with tiny multi-coloured heart stitches that my Pfaff can do, as I was considering putting them all along the binding. Somehow that seemed too stylized, so I chose to just do a single small heart which I will try to position above my signature for the dot of the letter 'i'. It probably would have been wise to write my name first and then do the heart dot over the 'i'. I seem to be one of those sewers who must do everything the hard way first!

Follow Your Heart

After completing a bigger project, I often find myself in a lull where I need to do something straight forward like sewing or quilting as my designing juices begin to bubble again. I've been completing quilting 'Follow Your Heart'. It arose a few months ago from rather randomly piecing scraps and delighting in all the colours joining together. No plan, just the fun of seeing 'what if' and then going with the flow. And then I had to lay it aside when my Pfaff kept breaking the threads on my hearts and quilting them became unmanageable. I feel so much satisfaction returning to finish this quilt now, because I have almost felt as though I've stopped producing work since I have several quilts that I had to put on hold because of my machine's malfunctioning. Now I can complete them between working on other pieces.