The Red Centre - Month 9

I can't believe it's been almost two weeks! My apologies, but I think you'll find the wait was worth it today. Here are the latest photos of Valerie Giles' Australian Aboriginal version of Sedona Star. Valerie has approached the applique months in a completely different way:

Wombat

I love that background fabric! I asked Valerie how she made these. She tells me that she started with a chalk outline on black fabric, and then fused the patches of Aboriginal fabrics onto that. Isn't it great the way she maintained the continuity of the fabric pattern across the different patches? On the wombat the fused patches were finished with a hand blanket stitch, but on some of the others she did a machine satin stitch with variegated thread:

Koala

Then the black background was embellished by hand with running stitch, back stitch and "many, many French knots" in No. 5 perle cotton. The whole applique was then stitched to the background with a machine satin stitch in black thread.

I really love these, and I think it would be fairly easy to apply this technique to other shapes. Some of the animals are adapted from a book by Julie McKenzie, and some are Valerie's own design.

So here's the whole quilt all the way through Month 9:

The Red Centre

It's looking great. Thanks so much, Valerie, for sharing your work!


Related Posts:

Click here to read last February's post about Valerie's inspiration for her version of Sedona Star

And click here to read about the original Sedona Star designer Sarah Vedeler's inspiration!

Juin - Almost Finished!

It is hard to believe that my last post on this project was in February, but I finally have just a few more odds and ends to finish up on my "Juin" (June) sampler from Bonheur des Dames. It has been a long time coming, given that I started it in 2004! It was packed away for many years, but I took it out again in early 2011 as part of a big push to clear up some UFOs. So it has still been over a year of on-and-off work.

Yesterday I finished up the leaves and stems on the middle cherry motif:

They still need a bit of backstitching around the cherries. And today I did the "Juin" lettering in petit point:

The close up photo is a little misleading - this is 32-count linen.  It was fun though!  No colour changes, it used one strand each of medium and dark green blended in the needle.

So, I have one and a half cherry motifs to go, and a fair bit still of backstitching over one around the figures in the middle row (which is a little tricky), and that'll be it!  Now that I've written this post, I really will have to finish it soon.  ;)