Working On a Little Bit of Applique

It feels like I have been plod, plod, plodding along. Never getting very far but not falling behind either. Mostly, my time has been spent with hand work lately. 

Seedpod Flower Quilt center

The Seedpod center is finished now. I went ahead and broke the applique shapes into several different pieces instead of letting cutting it out into one single shape. I was afraid that the little skinny stems would fight me and ruin the look of the flower. Sometimes when there are a lot of 'offshoots' it's hard to get things stitched down without little wrinkles somewhere. And of course the base of the flower has a little poochiness from all the stems converging in one place. Nothing to be done about that at this point. The top leaf on the right is bugging me just a little too and I may go back and drop it down some. We'll see. It's all stitched up now and that feels good to have that part behind me.

Little baskets

These baskets and the blocks below are part of the next border for Sweet Tart Baskets quilt. I didn't realize that so much time has passed since I last worked on that quilt. Four months! It seems like just the other day when I finally sewed the four larger baskets together. The idea here, for the next border,  is that there will be nine little baskets {with flowers} and for the every-other-block, nine of what's pictured below.

Border blocks

I didn't want to mess up the look of the striped fabric in the center, and so appliqued the smaller squares over the top. All nine are done now, but as you can see, the center square is not exactly 'square' to the block. They are all like that, but strangely enough, I don't care. The prep work is all done for each of the small basket blocks so that's a step forward. Applique prep always takes more time than it seems that it should, but well worth the time and effort once that magic window of time to applique has presented itself.

You might not have noticed, but the basket block is some smaller than the every-other-block. That's because I intend to add some cheddar/white half square triangles all around the basket block when the applique is done. I'm having a blast working with the zingy cheddar/golds in this quilt and of course, baskets.... swoon! All right up my alley. Crazy as it sounds, the entire time I'm working on these two quilts, my mind is whirring and churning, thinking up ideas for the next couple applique quilts.*sigh  So many wonderfully shiny new ideas and so little time....