Originally Blogged on Tuesday, 12 April 2005
At this point with nearly all the seams done and not many embellishments to go on I am starting to think about balancing the overall look of the piece….one way that I do that is to repeat some elements and as this seam is on the opposite side to the one where I used the green/burgundy variegated thread it was a good place to put another hint of the green….I did Wheat Stitch which I angled across the seam, it looked to sparse so I added Detached Chain Stitches in the gaps but they looked so like leaves I just had to add stems and the lace flowers….Truth is I should have stopped with the wheat stitch because the bride chastised me today for making my stitches ‘to fancy’ lol… but without realizing it I have made them fancier than I intended…I had interpreted simple as using the basic stitches and thought that I was doing well to do the whole back without a bead, button or charm which are the things I think of as fancy but forgot that whilst the basic stitches are simple/easy to stitch, when you combine them they look fancy…with that thought in mind I can see that the wheat stitch was simple, not sparse and that the flowers although simple to stitch on, do make the seam fancy…Ooops, just as well the bride knows me well and I won’t be made to take them off…It is going to be very interesting when we get the 2 dresses together because in the meantime her other friends have coaxed her into adding more beads and lace than she had intended to and I think that on close inspection mine may have fancier stitching than hers but On the day mine will blend into the Garden setting and it will be her dress that sparkles.
This seam was to be this variation of Fly Stitch
To make it a little different I thought that I would make the Fly Stitch wider, while I was doing the first row I thought that it would look nice with multiple rows, which is what I did, tapering them into a point….It was also only going to be on one side of the seam but it didn’t look quite right so I mirrored the pattern onto the lace patch and even though the stitches can barely be seen on the lace the seam does look finished with them there…I put a Colonial Knot on each point to emphasis the diamond that was formed.
Mary-Frances commented …. That is absolutely GORGEOUS! I can’t wait to see it all together.
So, we were chatting at our last crazy quilting meeting about different approaches to embellishment….do you plan it all out ahead or does it just “happen”? We decided that CQ folks seem to do one or the other.
My Reply ….”It Just Happens” …. I have a loose plan of what colours I want and what stitches and embellishments might suit the theme of the piece that I am working on but have no idea of what I am going to do until it happens… When I was doing my Diploma of Visual Arts and Crafts I had problems in my Visual Diary class because I couldn’t explain to my tutor that I could not pre plan a piece of crazy quilting, because of being frustrated with her insistence that I had to plan a piece of crazy before stitching it, I missed learning that Visual Journals can be used for crazy quilting and are a valuable resource for crazy quilters…. Several years Later Sharon explained Visual Journals to me in a way that I could understand…. she said to me that I was “the back of an envelope girl” and with that I understood Visual Journals which I now love, I still scribble things on the backs of envelopes but now some of them get glued into my journal before getting lost…Visual Journals are great for recording and developing ideas, techniques and instructions and for making the loose plans to get started but the actual crazy quilting still just happens and I can’t imagine not being able to change my mind mid stitch as I did with the second stitch I showed you tonight.
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