Applique is my Passion

Birds in Wool, the pattern will be available January 30, 2017 at Critter Pattern Works  Exploring feather stitch..to attach a leaf shape to the background or,  draw the shapes of feathers,  double feather stitch over the the background overlapped joins  different lengths on the arms of the feather stitches. Feather stitching with fly stitches and lazy daisy stitches on the arms. Herringbone stitches and do-dads attached to the x's.

It is always a challenge to think up a new theme to try for my Felted Applique technique.  I have been kicking around the idea of birds since my Birds and Flowers machine applique pattern is about to run out.  There is so much more I can do with felting than machine applique to make the birds look more real with shading and hand embroidery for the details.  The trick to getting the birds to look like their real buddies out at my bird feeder is getting the beaks the right shape and with sharp points.   The dove at the bottom left still needs legs and feet, but they may go into the border. The crazy quilt stitching where the blocks overlap is my unique take on basic stitches like feather stitch or herringbone stitch and adding more stitches to the “arms” of the base stitch like a chain stitch, or fly, or French knot (I prefer a  Colonial stitch  to French knot because they don't get pulled to the wrong side of the quilt top). On our trip to M...

I don't know what took so long.  Usually it doesn't take a month to finish writing a pattern, but I guess I wasn't as focused as I usually am.  The Crows pattern has 17 pages, seven pages of which are of crows drawings and one page of feather drawings for the quilting in the border.   Crows pattern  is up on our website ready to fly to your house as a PDF pattern or a printed snail mailed pattern.

This is the Crows quilt with the appliques sewn through the backgrounds and cotton batting. At this point I have added the backing fabric so the quilting of the backgrounds goes through all three layers.  Each block has a different quilting design.  This is a study in variations of quilting patterns as they relate to my subject matter. All the crows have beaded eyes using  "iris" colored glass beads.