WIP Wednesday: Boston on my Mind (and Machine)

Sometimes It is always important to put aside time to do the projects that really matter to you. When I started to see the posts about making flags and quilt blocks for Boston, my second thought was, I have no idea when I am going to fit that in. My first thought, of course, was I can't wait to do that! Guess which thought wins today!

Top of my WIP list was to make a pair of flags for The Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild's To Boston with Love project. I was hoping for company and was so excited when my friend Tanya said she would love to help out. Did I mention that Tanya has this cool Phaff embroidery machine and lots of great embroidery designs? (Don't worry T - I adore you for more than your machines!)

First we stitched out a Bee ('B' for Boston, get it?) on a piece of off-white cotton. It was from a red work design she had and she isolated the bee from the design and enlarged it quite a bit.

I brought over some fabrics that I wanted to work with. I took a little liberty with the color palette because I was really feeling the red, orange and grey thing for some reason. Oh well, gotta go with the inspiration when it strikes, right?

Then we embroidered this Scandinavian-esque heart. Tanya has that Danish-design flair and this heart was just was so her that I insisted we use it. We played a bit with the layout of the piecing: I sewed the flags together and Tanya did all the pressing (she has a magic touch with an iron, I swear!)

Here are our finished flags! I am going to work on my quilt block next for the Quilts for Boston project. I think I am going to use a paper piecing pattern I designed a while back based on a blue Sonia Delaunay painting.

I'll end on this note today: I was franticly trying to finish a quilt at the beginning of the week. My sewing machine was was acting like my dog when he doesn't want to come in from outside (are sewing machines like dogs? who knew...) It seemed like the feed dogs (aha! you knew that pun was gonna happen!) were not working quite right, so I opened it up and took a look inside. About twenty minutes later, every machine part was on the table as well as a gigantic pile of lint (Monica from Happy Zombie acurately called it a 'lint harvest')

I think I am also going to take my machine in for a full spa treatment. After WIP wednesday, though. I have a few things to sew first...

#98 on WIP Wed today :-)