Freezing Friday

First snow of the season!

Last night was cold and rainy.  And snowy up the mountain.  Note the snow line.  We covered our raised vegetable beds, the blue tarp, hoping to get one more harvest from the tomatoes.  Since my flowers in the pots on the patio didn't freeze, I think we escaped the hard freeze.

Last week I posted the results from the Wales group's lime green fabric challenge. I had someone ask how I made my piece.  I took in progress photographs so will share the process here.

Bottom shadow

I sewed the dark blue strip to the leaf print.  I still have a bit of my favorite navy blue Moda Marble fabric.  I love the texture in the print.  It gives more oomph to a design than a flat solid.  Right now working with solids is "in".  My opinion, so feel free to have your own ideas about this, but I don't like to use plain solids unless it is black or white for backgrounds unless I am doing all solids.

Free form cuts

I wanted to have nesting curves, so I free form cut my pieces out.  I should have cut the curves tighter, they smoothed out  more than I wanted for the final version.

Side shadows

I added side shadows to each piece. I used a bias strip thinking that it would work better with the curves.  Eh, didn't really work that way.

Adding in the background

I layered the curved pieces on top of the background and then cut the background with the same curve. Then sewed the two piece, cut the next side and so on.  On issue was that I need to make sure that the lines of the bottom shadows matched.  After I had all 4 pieces sewn into the background, I trimmed the top and bottom and sewed on the border.

Top completed

The finished top.  One thing that I did do, which is unusual for me, I made sure that the background print was facing the same direction in all of the piecing.  The print is directional, but it is very subtle.  Normally I would just whack away at it, but this time I was trying to be more grown up about it.  I wonder if it would look any different if I had used the background in any direction?

Finished piece!

I quilted it using my trusty walking foot.  I am happy with the way it turned out!  I would have like the curves in the pieces to be more curvy, but it was a good learning experience.

Close up of the quilting

This is my Off the Wall post for the week.  Check out what everyone else is up to at Nina-Marie's blog.

And since I have a finished piece I am linking to TGIFF and Link a Finish Friday!


Also, check back on October 1st!  I am participating in a blog hop and it should be a lot of fun!