Shedd's Aquarium

I finally finished my FFFC from 2 months ago, which required that we use an underwater scene, and that we do something different when finishing the edging. I faced mine. I was really happy with how it turned out. I used two photographs of an aquarium that I took when I visited Shedd's Aquarium in Chicago in 2008. I printed the photos on fabric and thread painted the whole thing. I embellished with beads and shells that I picked up on Virginia Beach last month. It took me hours to do all the machine stitching. Now my husband says, "What are you going to do with it now that it's finished?" I hadn't thought about that. I just enjoyed being involved with the process.

Forest Mushrooms

This is my latest quilt made for Fast Friday Fabric Challenge. The requirements were that we use fungi is some shape or form. I made the two white mushrooms separately, stuffed the one with fiberfil and used a layer of quilt batting in the other one to make them stand out from the surface. I appliqued them on. I wanted to depict moss on the tree in the background, so I used textile paint. I used a textile marker for the surface coloring on the mushrooms. I had some leaves that I had collected and dried from last fall and a few from a florist's arrangement. I stitched these on by machine. I was surprised at how supple the oak and maple leaves stayed. I thought they might disintegrate as I stitched them, but they didn't. This little quilt 13" x 16.6" only took 4 hours to create. My husband says if I hadn't told him this was a depiction of mushrooms, he couldn't tell what they were. I told him he needs to think more creatively. At any rate, it was fun quilt to make and something quite different from the normal quilt.