Moody Beauty!

     Thanks to those Facebook reminders, I realized that April 7 is the 5th anniversary of my blog!  Glad I had this piece done to mark the occasion!  

     I have finally completed the New York Beauty hanging!  Given the dark, rich, moody colors, I am calling this Moody Beauty.   As I have recently recounted, I had finished the blocks, which were 5 different patterns of New York Beauty blocks, in April of 2017.  The blog from last year can be found here.  

     I had started these with some scraps of Kaffe Fassett material, combined with Kona solids and a few other bits and pieces.  I was testing the patterns with the idea of making an entire bed quilt from newer Kaffe fabrics I had been gifted.    Although this started as just a tester piece, I loved the colors and the mix of fabrics, and decided to put together a wall hanging.   The piece is 32 inches square.    I haven't decided whether to tackle the larger quilt.  

     I also decided to use this as a test of some dense quilting that I had seen in others' works.  I have close ups of the 5 different sections below.

     I used a variety of threads on the top, with a turquoise Aurifil thread in the bobbin.  I had a large piece of pale lavendar Kona that I used for the back.   I quilted heavily on the printed fabrics, and kept the solid points unquilted.  They pop quite nicely.   You can see the quilting much more easily on the back.  Neither the quilting nor the piecing is perfect by any means, but I am absolutely loving the final product.   I had just enough of the purple bubble fabric to use as the binding.  I had considered the black and white stripe that is currently my go-to binding, but I found it too distracting.  

     I was spurred to finish by a flyer for another quilt show at my local little library.   I had a quilt hanging in the show last year, and it was a very nice little showing of local quilting.   I went to hand in my slip yesterday, and was told it had been cancelled because of lack of entries.  I pointed out that the slip didn't even require the return of the entry form until May 5 (a full month away), but was not persuasive enough!  I am still shaking my head over this one!  

     I will hang this in my new sewing space, and then will share pictures of that redo!

Take care,
Gretchen