Take It Further for May

Technically I have two more days in which to finish my postcard quilt for May's TIF challenge. I might make it. I pieced two potential tops today. It remains to be seen which one I'll end up using. Or whether I piece yet another one!

My original idea for this month's challenge (in terms of your artistic endeavors, "What do you call yourself and why?") involved intuitive piecing and reverse applique. In the last week or so it dawned on me that perhaps the reason I'd been avoiding work on this challenge was that reverse applique is not in my usual bag of tricks. I've done a minimal amount of it, and on this small scale what I'd planned was certainly do-able, but I wasn't looking forward to it. So then I thought, "Why am I not using the techniques I normally use?" I consider myself an artist; the way I execute my postcard quilt will demonstrate the kind of artist I am. Duh.

Postcard number one:



Postcard number two:

All I have to do is embellish one of them in a way that I feel gives the viewer a good idea of the kind of art I'm making nowadays!

Here's a shot of what part of my design wall looks like at the moment:

This picture shows only about half of the design space I have available. But you can see the postcards and my unfinished BJP journal quilts lined up across the bottom. After the postcards I started piecing a top for that blank bit of batting in the middle. That will become my journal page for April. I'm going to get that pieced and then concentrate on embellishing this lot (six of the seven pieces you see on the wall; the single heart on a purple ground is still an orphan block). I only have one place where I can either sit and bead or sit and use the sewing machine. There have been times when I've had both a piecing project and a beading project going at the same time but I've since learned that it works better to focus on one or the other at any given time. I lose fewer beads that way ;- )

By the way, in case you hadn't read about it elsewhere, Sharon B of In A Minute Ago has started a new community site for those who have any interest at all in things related to stitching or fiberwork. It's called Stitchin' Fingers. She set it up in part for those who don't maintain a blog of their own as a place to share their efforts with others and to interact with like-minded individuals. Subsets within the larger community are being formed for specific interests or activities like swaps and round robins. You can check it out here.