So as many of you saw in the last post, I got the bug to start doing things again after being home for the holidays and seeing my mom back on the making kick. She and my father retired and built a "cabin" on a mountain in the woods. It's nice, but my dad's garage is bigger than my house. On that note, my mother has a beautiful space to work as well, with two big windows and great light!

So they don't live far from Keepsake Quilting, and they went one weekend and as my father wandered he apparently found the patten from Seams like Home called "Bringing home the Tree" and commented "Gee, this would look nice on the wall in the living room..." As you can imagine, the pattern went home with them. I'd also like to note that my mother's background is also not quilting, she made our clothes as kids, but in general she's WAY to anal to quilt.

So as you can see in the photo on the upper right, it's a nice winter scene applique that's done as a wall hanging. And it is nice, but she wasn't sure where to start but once I looked at the pattern I had some definite ideas. When I was home for thanksgiving, we went back to Keepsake, they had a kit available to make the wall hanging, but I really didn't like their fabric choices. We wandered and decided on a nice stack of pale and muted batiks. Most of them were pale blues, and tinted creams, but we also picked a frosted piece. I left for home without getting much farther than picking and buying them, I told mom to let me think about it before starting, as I really didn't like the snowball background. The more I looked at the pattern, the more I thought they took away from the pattern and the overall image. I ran across a book on watercolor quilts at one of the local quilt shops and had my idea... but did I want to sew all those little squares? She's got two nice Pfaff machines with the IDT (even feed) but come on....

I thought for a while and decided I'd really like to try a Quiltsmart background for this one. I admit, for those of you that really know me... I'm normally not a huge fan of the Quiltsmart interfacing. In particular, because I used to do machine quilting, and I absolutely hate the extra weight and bulk it adds to the quilt top. BUT we're not making a bed quilt, but a wallhanging. So, I went to the local shop and bought a couple of yards of what ends up being 1.5 inch finished squares. I brough it home with me for christmas, and my mother was horrified (being an anal retentive non quilting seam matcher) that we were going to sew that many little squares. (we also walked into Peggy Anne's while I was home and they were working on an awesome Quiltsmart Mariner's Compass/Star that should be on their website soone.

For those of you that haven't played with quiltsmart, it's admittedly pretty nifty. It's iron on interfacing that has the quilt pattern printed on it along with sewing and quilting lines. It's easy to do, and is pretty much no fail. AND it's got the directions printed on the interfacing..... can't beat that. It's impossibly to lose the instructions (not that I would ever lose instructions). The one that I bought is also used for Scrap Therapy projects.

So mom and I cleared the counter in the Kitchen and cut what seemed like a bazillion little two inch squares and then arranged/ironed them all onto the interfacing in some sort of random order that made me happy. And then came the sewing.... which was no where as bad as I expected! I sewed and ironed and sewed and ironed and ended up with a really cool looking piece of modern art from the back. (Go look at the flickr page! people were more interested in the sewn and folder words than the piece).

And when it was flipped over and done, I was really impressed. You're not going to notice the extra weight for two reasons. 1 is the fact that there is going to be tons of fused applique on top of it, and 2 it's a wall hanging! So the back is done and the border is chosen, but that's as far as we got over the holidays..... So more photos to come when the project gets farther!

I do have to admit that the quiltsmart went together really easily... the squares are 1.5 inches finished, and it's a fairly good sized piece. All total the whole thing from cutting to finished background went together in an evening, and overall I really like the effect of the small pieces better than large 5 inch snowballs.