Bees' Secret Details

Several people asked for detail shots from my "The Bees' Secret" quilt, so here are two.

I'm rather proud of the quilting on this piece, as it adds to the bark-like look a lot. You can see some here. I even quilted in knot-holes and irregularities, which was very fun. This was also a stretch because I had almost NO brown fabric in my stash, and had to search out browns for the tree. Once I started looking at brown fabrics, I was surprised to find that I really liked some of them, especially the rich, earthy batiks. I really enjoyed working with the variety of browns in this, which makes me think that I should explore brown a bit further.



Here's a close-up of the edge. As I really wanted to keep the irregular edge, I had to figure out how to do this. Melody, if I'd known about the satin-stitch edging technique, I might have tried that, but to be honest I'm not wild about how that looks. It's too unfinished looking for my taste. (But I don't like clothes where they do those sort of seams on the outside, either...just one of those things.) So I did my own pillow-case method, with lots of careful trimming and clipping to get the corners. When ever I do this sort of thing, I realize that my high school sewing and tailoring classes paid off. It was fiddly -- required time and care and patience -- but it came out looking the way I wanted to, so I was pleased. I fused the "turning" hole on the back closed and covered it with the hanging sleeve.

This year's challenge is "The Sound of Quilting", with the idea to make a small quilt that illustrates or is inspired by a sound or noise. I'm mulling that over... What would YOU do?