Thursday, April 2, 2009

A Little Hellfire

These are some customer quilts that we had been working on in the quilt shop for a while. They are finally finished and in the customer's hands ~ a great feeling! Both were done for the first grade classes of a local private school for their fundraiser auction. We made them based on sketches that the ladies brought in to us, they are both full size quilts. The back of each quilt is done in the same green tartan that is framing the silhouettes, which is the school's colors and we put large school flags with the dragon mascot centered on them ~ I just forgot to take pictures of the backs :(

They were really made as a joint effort by our entire staff. Carolyn did work on all of the silhouettes, Mary did all of the quilting, I appliqued the dragons, flags, and corner letters, and did the binding on one of them. Starlyn, however headed up the team, doing the most of the work on both quilts. She did all of the machine embroidery (the center letters and words on the flags on the backs), she made four dragons, couching black thread for all of the lines and creating large "applique patches" to put on the quilts (this was huge!). She and I did all of the calculations for size and cutting, and together we pieced the square one (the oval one was done as one large piece of background fabric), and Starlyn also bound one and did some of the applique to get them done by our deadline.

I asked Starlyn one day if she had named the dragon yet, since she had spent so much time with him, and she said his name was "Hellfire". So as a little joke, I made this pincushion for her of "Hellfire" so that she has something to remember him by. (I just printed out a picture of the cropped down dragon on a fabric sheet and sewed it into a stuffed pillow shape). It's not blurry and washed out in real life, he's nice and sharp red like the larger versions ~ I don't know what happened with this picture.

Yesterday at work we didn't get any sewing done since we rearranged the shop ~ we now have all of the wool, roving and stitchery on the same side of the shop as the knitting, so if you haven't been in for a while, stop in and see us! It's been quite an organizing week for me since I did get my craft and storage room done too! I'm going to take a break and try to do some handwork today, I deserve it :)

Enjoy the day!
~ Dawn

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