Design Wall Wednesday

             

I am starting the new year out in a flurry of activity!  I have 4 projects on my design wall today!  The big applique piece is the center medallion for ‘Jingle’, Erin Russek’s BOM for 2013.  It is glued on, but has yet to be stitched, so it’s not as far along as it looks.  There is a lot of stitching yet to do in that piece!  Like I said before,  this is the center medallion for this quilt.  There will be other smaller blocks surrounding it, but it will be a mystery exactly what they are until they are unveiled, one each month for the entire year.  She has told us that it has a Christmas theme, hence the name ‘Jingle’.  And the center medallion is called Miss Kringle. 

                   

Here is a closer look.  I’m hoping to have this done by next week.  I have other projects to work on, you know!  Some of them are on the wall with Miss Kringle.  To the left you see 3 blocks from The Barrister’s Block, a sampler quilt that was a year long project from last year.  I wanted to make that quilt, but really didn’t know how I wanted to do it.  Now I know.

For years I have saved my husband’s worn out shirts.  The cuffs and the collars grew worn a long time before the rest of the shirt did, and I knew that the fabric was still good.  So instead of throwing the shirt into the trash, I threw it into a lawn and leaf bag that I kept in my cedar closet just for this purpose.  Now that he is so sick, I have sorted out the shirts and cut them from the seams so that they are just hunks of fabric.  I pressed them and folded them and stacked them into 2 giant piles.  And I am going to make a Barrister’s Block quilt out of them.  Maybe (hopefully) two of them.  I want one for both of my step children.  I think they will like that.

I also have the embroidered panels of the second French Cottage Garden still hanging on the wall.  You will recall that I am making 2 of these quilts to use as bed spreads in a guest bedroom.  The other one is sitting by my sewing maching having pinwheel blocks sewn on. 

The fourth thing on my design wall…….. look over on the far right of the picture.  You will see a long sheet of freezer paper.  That is a template for making this -

            

I have spent a long time studying this photo.  There is also a tutorial somewhere on the web that I read over and over for making this quilt.  But I have decided that this quilt would be easier to make if it were paper pieced instead of all the endless strip piecing that the tutorial used.  So I devised a template for paper piecing this.  I haven’t started yet.  But you can rest assured that I will let you know how it all turns out!  In the mean time, I’m going to be sewing my fingers to the bone ……

Enjoy,  Merry Gay