December 2015 FMQ Challenge

Here comes the last pillow for the year for the 2015 FMQ challenge over at Quiltshopgal. What a year it has been...I did a total of 11 pillow, missing out on September. Not a bad result. I will do a bit of a collage towards the end of this year.

The expert for this month was Wendy Sheppard from Ivory Spring. I chose Option #6 using Wendy's Thread Talk series on her blog as my starting point.

For the front, I used Thread Talk #57 the Roundabout Wreath, starting off with a lot of drawings before I got the hang of it.

As usual, there was some drama when I was marking it...for some reason I had marked the motif with my white chalk marker rather than the water soluble blue marker pen that I usually use. And a good thing it was...half way through pinning, I pricked myself with one of the pins and bled all over it...could not believe it. As it was rather hot over here, it literally dried before my eyes and just water did not get it out. The blood had dripped smack bang in one of the plumes! In the end I used vinegar which did do the trick, but left me with very faint white lines. Had I used the blue marker this would have been a right old mess!

Wreath completed, on to the filler

 For the filler I used Patsy Thompson's method of plumifying the background. Love doing this and again felt that this background filler is extraordinarily forgiving which is always a good thing on a solid background

There are a great many odd shapes and arrangements in this but you would not notice as it is the texture that stands out rather than the individual shapes...I pretty much did my own thing, so much so, I watched that section of her class again and realised that I was not really following the instructions...so mine is a bit of a combination of two fillers she demonstrated.

Here is the pillow (and that is the real colour!)

Front of the pillow

For the back I used Wendy's trademark design, the Jester's Hat (Thread Talk #34)

Back of the pillow

Luckily I had done this before, so it went quickly. Not quite as easy as it looks and a bit hard to keep consistent on a solid background...but absolutely lovely to look at.

Lastly, I used Aurifil 50/2 thread for the background thinking that it would just blend in. For some reason, this colour has an enormous presence and if you look at the front of the pillow it somewhat overtakes the wreath which was done in a yellow tone...go figure!

Linking up to the 2015 FMQ Challenge at Quiltshopgal.

Karin