Project Quilting Season 8 Week 3 "Tune into Texture"

A couple weeks ago I saw this picture of a mosaic and fell in love with it.  When I heard the title of this weeks challenge "Tuned into Texture" I immediately thought of the mosaic. 

Green isn't my color I want to do it in another color pallet. I went searching my stash to find that I didn't have anything I wanted to use for my main colors.  I headed out to my favorite quilt shop. 

This is my starter fabric selection.  I will fill in with other things from my stash.

I've decided to add some crochet & tatted doilies that I also found in my stash.  When I stop at a garage sale these hand done items usually find their way home with me.  Its such a shame to see these beautiful treasures sitting forgotten at a garage sale when someone spent their time creating them.  

 

I started by drawing this beginning design which is a 16 inch square.

I plan to use it to cut my fabric pieces, each section will then be cut into smaller pieces to get the appearance of the mosaic. In doing this my piece will be larger than this original.  For my fabric I first cut 8 x 10 rectangles and backed them with wonder under so they could be fused to the background. I used butcher paper to trace each section of my design, once traced I ironed the butcher paper cutout to the front of my fabric with the wonder under backing.  I then cut out each shape.  I worked on one section at a time.  Once I cut a shape from the fabric, cut it into the small mosaic blocks you can see. As I cut the little pieces it was a challenge to keep them in order so I could put them back together.   Using teasers I placed each piece on the background.  The next two photos show my progress.  I worked in sections.  Once I was happy with a section I ironed it down. On the second photo you can see the little pieces sitting off to the side.   I used 505 spray adhesive to hold the doilies in place.

 

This weekend I was scheduled to attend a sewing retreat with the Clothing & Textile Advisors of Washington.  This is a wonderful group that I joined a couple years ago.  If you have ever attended the Sewing & Stitchery Expo in Puyallup Washington this is the organization that provides the volunteer staff to help run the expo. We spent the weekend at a church camp in Black Diamond Washington.  It ended a little early today because we woke up to snow.

 

Once I had all my pieces in place I added batting to the back and used my stitch regulator (BSR) to stitch down all of the pieces. The final step was to trim it to final size, add backing and binding.

 

It was a bit to ambitious for a retreat weekend but it is done.

The bottom photo was taken at the retreat so I could enter the challenge.

I wasn't able to get all the detail in that picture.  

This photo was taken today and shows the color and detail much better.