Ebay Treasures & Spiderwebs

Last night, I was wondering what I would blog about today since again, I didn't stitch. Yes Sue, I do think the world is coming to an end! I haven't stitched since Sunday. What's up with that? Honestly, I've had a couple of very large design projects with tight deadlines and I'm pushing myself to get them done. I won't miss the "I need it yesterday" stuff when I retire!

Anyway, my husband came in with the mail and I suddenly had some cool "show & tell" for you today!

I found these pretty little machine embroidered bird mats on Ebay over the weekend:



I'm sure ya'll know what I plan to do with these! Yep, they were just screaming at to me to be the focal points on crazy quilts. Aren't they pretty? I'm not sure if I'll put them all together in one quilt or if I'll use them individually. I do wish I could stitch my projects as fast as I can collect stash! I'm sure I'll get to these someday. In the meantime, I'll enjoy having them and planning out my projects.

I think I was attracted to these because of my Crazy Quilt book. They must remind me of something in there. Looking at the all the old Victorian quilts, I do see a certain "oriental" flair in many of them. Until now, I never believed that crazy quilting was the result of Oriental Crazed Pottery. Now, it does seem a little more possible although I'm still a bit skeptical.

On another note, Angela asked me the other day how I do my spiderwebs and if I couch them:



Yes, they are couched on. I don't use a pattern, I just freehand them. First I do the long threads starting in the center and then I go around and around and do the connecting threads. Once the entire web is done, I go back around and couch everything down.

Does anyone else have any questions for me? I'll be happy to answer them. Just leave a message in the comments section.

An Interesting Discovery

Scott and I went over to my parents house for a few hours yesterday afternoon. Mom hadn't seen my Crazy Quilt book yet, nor had she seen my little crazy quilt that I bought at the flea market two weeks so I took those with me.

While looking at the quilts in my book, we discovered that this little embroidered frog on my quilt:



is the same exact frog as on this quilt in my book:



They're reversed, but it's the same pattern. Was I at all surprised with this discovery? No. Embroidery patterns in the Victorian days were mass produced and "shared" almost as much as they are now. I just thought it was kind of cool!

Happy 4th Of July!

I was too tired to stitch last night so I don't have anything to share with you today.

Instead, I'll simply wish you a safe and happy 4th of July!

More On Maxine's Quilt

I added 3 more motifs to this quilt over the weekend. First, an antique crazy quilt is not complete without a spider and web! That's my opinion anyway! So I added one:



I love stitching the webs! That's why they show up on many of my CQ's. I just plain like doing them. As for the spider, I keep a big of misc. chunky beads in my bead cabinet. These are perfect for spiders. Because this quilt is so large, I used the biggest glass bead I had for the body and then a smaller glass bead for the head.

Next, I added a fan:



The fan idea came from looking at the pictures in my Penny McMorris book. Maxine had given me an 8 inch doily from her collection to use on this quilt. It was almost too large to use as it was so I cut it into 1/4's and used one to create this fan. I also had to "age" it which I did before I cut it. The trim that I used is also from Maxine's collection of vintage things and the tassel was from my collection. The flowers are a vintage corsage that Maxine gave me to use on this.

I'll be using the other 3 sections of the doily to create fans too. All will be different.

Last but not least, my mom crocheted a few more pansies for me so I sewed one on, did a chain stitch for the stem and used some large green beads that I had for the leaves:



All in all, I've been enjoying the process of further embellishing this quilt with the exception of not being able to use a hoop on it. I really dislike stitching "in hand". The easiest way I've found to work on this is to roll the excess up and lay it to the side of me on the sofa.

At the moment, I'm working on balancing it out with some more "points of interest". Once I feel that's done, I'll fill in with some small embroidered motifs here and there. It's a slow process really. It takes much longer to embellish a large motif on this quilt as opposed to the small motifs that I do on my cellphone pouches and purses. But it's a nice change of pace for me and certainly, an interesting challenge!

New Brief

I have a few updates for you today. First, I finished this motif on Maxine's quilt:



The flower centers are beads that I found on sale at WalMart yesterday. I have some butterflies that I found too but I thought I'd wait on adding those until I had everything else done.

I couldn't decide on what to do next. I have a bunch of neat ideas but I just couldn't pick one so instead of starting a new motif on this quilt, I put it to the side and picked up my B/C Awareness purse project:



I didn't quite get the whole piece in the picture but you can see what I worked on yesterday.

I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone who either left comments here for me or who emailed me to tell me what a Biscornu is. Thank you! I had no idea. If you haven't checked the comments, a Biscornu is a pincushion. An 8 sided pincushion I believe. I still have a few links to look at but have enjoyed what I've seen so far! They seem simple enough to make and am thinking that a CQ one would be very interesting. Although, with everything I sew onto my CQ's I doubt there would be any room left to put pins!

A quick final note for today, I have some of my mom's x stitch stuff listed over at Ebay and they are all ending this afternoon. If anyone is interested, you can search by my username: kitty-and-me .

I still have more of her de-stash to list so if I have some free time this afternoon, I'll list a few more things for her.