My amazing friend Mary Brewer made my sister-in-law Elin a piece of artwork. It was so amazing that I asked her if I could get a copy of it. She designed the art on the computer and had it printed out on fabric at Spoonflower. I’m sure you all know what a fan I am of these people and this company. The coolest people ever!
Mary sent me the fabric of her lyre-bird and I was so excited to receive it that I went out that very day to get all the supplies that I needed to make my wall hanging. Here is the fabric I received and yes, it is not ironed.
I decided to make a double border in greens pulling out the green in the lyre-bird because I love green and have a lot of it around my home. First I cut out strips of the stripes making sure that the stripes would be consistent around the piece.
The first strip sewn. I’m loving this already.
After sewing on the second strip, I decided to miter the corner instead of sewing all the way down.
Here is the piece with the first fabric border sewn.
I want the first border to be 2” so I measure off.
I pink the piece on a full piece of dark green fabric. I don’t worry about the extra layer because I actually want to bulk this up for my wall hanging.
Measuring 4” around for the 2nd border. Some of this will go away in seam allowance. And yes, my ruler is broken.
I want to quilt this wall hanging so I bought “Quilter’s Fusible Batting.” Now I have to say first and foremost…I AM NOT A QUILTER AND I HAVE NEVER USED THIS PRODUCT BEFORE. I can hear all real quilters out there groaning and at this point in my project it seemed like a good idea. In hind site, I will never use this product again. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Laying out my bottom fabric and Fusible Batting. Notice I had to piece the top because I bought the baby quilt size and didn’t have enough for a full piece.
Top layer.
All trimmed up and ready to iron together.
***NOTE***
Ironing was a huge pain and it was very difficult to keep things flat and tight on a piece this size. It looked hard and bubbly in many spots so after working at the board for quite some time, I put the project on the floor and tried to iron things flat there. I won’t use the iron-on batting again. Pain.
Okay…skipping on to machine quilting. I put some nice shiny threads in my machine and stitched as much as I could with the machine. The tinier sharper corners I ended up hand-stitching.
Steps I didn’t get photos:
1. machine stitching
2. hand-stitching around bird and lyre
3. trimming and handstitching dark green fabric to the back of the project.
Time to cut out the loops.
You can see some quilting imperfections and some pulling in various spots.
But at the end of the day, all who walk into my house only say, “WOW!”
Thank you Mary!
Love,
Rachel
