Applique is my Passion

I am thrilled to be able to finally see the end coming to the Alphabet quilt in Wool that I have been working on since last summer.  The border is on, and I am now adding some trim between the main part of the quilt and the border.  I have auditioned the trim here to see if I liked it.  The trim is two wool yarns that I had in my stash that I ply-ed together and then ply-ed that on itself so that it is four yarns for thickness to cover where I joined the border. This trim also helps to hold the border on because I hand- sewed it on and the sewing goes through the border and the part with the letters.   Here is a closeup of the hand embroidery.

I've been exploring wool and dyeing along with needle felted appliques these past 8 months.   I started with white wool fabric and dyeing it with instructions in some dyeing books.  A little knowledge and a lot of experimental got me some dyed fabric that doesn't look like batik (which looks like everybody else's).  I was trying to find  the colors for a background that I could embellish with hand embroidery and felting as in these examples: I was thinking these strips would become borders for the Newest Flock of Sheep...one that has more open space to quilt.  However I found that they are too busy in design for that felted applique quilt.  The next quilt project is a reworking of the Alphabet quilt that I designed in 1996 in cotton. This is the new wool version:   All the wool fabrics, rovings and pearl cotton threads have been hand dyed by me. The Quail and the Rat are still appliques, and will get needle felted tomor...