Nedra's Surprise Quilt - Let's Party!!

My inspiration was a birthday party given for me by my best friend when I was 15 which meant a lot to me, thus the girly color scheme. I also tried to evoke the feelings I had when I entered the room and everyone unexpectedly and suddenly appeared and shouted surprise, so I wanted to make things pop!!!! I imagined an explosion of color and confetti and sparkles raining down around the word in the air of the room and tried to create that with my piece. I think that I accomplished that goal.

I did not take process pictures this time - so I will explain what I did.
I wanted to print the word surprise on a background piece but I wanted the letters to be scattered. Sooo... I printed the letters on paper and then using a light box, I traced the outline onto the background fabric. I wasn't sure how this would look, but I used setacolor paint to fill in the outline in a stencil like fashion. It came out pretty well so I then backed this fabric with fusible and cut out the letters, then fused to another piece of the background fabric in a scattered pattern. I then picked pinks and purples and applied fusible to them. I cut triangles of different sizes and shapes randomly and worked with them until I had an arrangement that appeared to pop. I fused these and used decorative stitching to embellish the edges. Next I cut confetti and streamers from the leftover fusing backed fabric and added them. When all of the pieces were fused, I sandwiched and machine quilted, finished the edges and squared it up. The finishing touches are metallic pieces and crystals which I glued on to add touches of sparkle. And voila, we have SURPRISE.

I have to admit that I made THREE pieces for this! After seeing them all together, I decided I liked the first one I made the best afterall.

If you scroll back in the blog postings, you may notice that I've posted twice. I wrote my post yesterday and saved it, but I didn't realize when I published it this morning it would still be dated 11/14. So I republished it for today's date. Sorry for the duplicate.

Alice's Surprise Quilt--Surprise in the Midst of Drought

The day after our last “reveal,” I went for an early morning walk, despite a prediction of a high of 100+° that day.  Much to my astonishment, just a block from our house I spied some lavender and purple wild flowers growing in a patch of dead weeds in the corner vacant lot.  How could they be blooming in the middle of the worst drought we have suffered in Texas in many decades? They were a total surprise!  Then I had an ah-ha moment:  I’d take a photo and base my Surprise quilt on those brave little wild flowers.  I used an enlargement of one of these pictures as a guide for composition and fabric colors. 

In constructing my Surprise quilt, I used the following materials and techniques:  For the background, I used a piece of hand-painted fabric, left over from another quilt, for the brownish yellow background.  The techniques I used included:  fusing raw-edge appliqués (the weeds); fusing and zig-zag stitching appliqués (the flowers and leaves); couching two different yarns for more weeds, to give dimension to the quilt; and beading for still more dimension (flower stamens). I hand-quilted with a running embroidery stitch, randomly placed, choosing a brown and an olive green embroidery floss.  The quilt is bound and backed with a multi-colored batik in the same colors as the dead weeds and the flowers’ leaves.