It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged but rest assured we have been super busy! This is our day on the “Juniper” Instagram Blog Hop – welcome!
When my quilty pal, Jessica Van Denburgh from Sew Many Creations asked me to make something from her new fabric collection,“Juniper”, I of course said yes! Quilty friends are the best and it’s always a pleasure to help out a friend and at the same time get to make one of our patterns with new fabrics.
Jessica’s new fabric collection, called “Juniper” for Windham Fabric is oh-so-cute and filled with delightful little flowers and flying creatures like beautiful butterflies, majestic dragonflies and some very cute snails.
Once I saw the fabrics, I knew our Garden Party pattern was the perfect project. I set out to make one Garden Party flower pot ! The Garden Party pattern is available in our Colourwerx shop and Jessica’s new fabric line “Juniper” will be arriving to shops this month so be on the lookout!
First off, I cut the background piece, added borders and layered my batting, backing fabric and the quilt top together in a quilt sandwich. Using my favorite Aurifil 40wt Gold thread – #2975 – I curvy quilted the background. This is just a regular straight stitch and keeping the feed dogs UP (like regular stitching) , I moved the quilt from side to side creating gentle undulations down the quilt. It’s fun and relaxing and always looks so “artsy”.
Hint, hint!- You may have noticed that I am machine quilting my quilt BEFORE I place the applique shapes in place – that’s because I’m not very good at free motion machine quilting, On smaller pieces such as this, I like to machine quilt the background first before fusing and stitching around the applique shapes. That way the piece is quilted and I don’t need to worry about machine quilting in and around shapes. So far, no quilt police have shown up at my door demanding the piece be handed over- lol!
Once the background was quilted I cut out and began to fuse and applique stitch my shapes in place. I started with the stem and leaves – centering them on on the background piece. I love to use my decorative stitches around shapes like these to texturize and embellish the applique – I find the decorative stitches enhance and add an extra dimension of fun and whimsy to the pieces.
Next up – the large pot. I used the widest zigzag stitch around this shape. My Bernina 750QE can go up to 9mm so that was the perfect choice.
Then the large flower head. I used my blanket stitch (aka buttonhole stitch). These pieces took the most time as there were lots of inner and outer curves to negotiate – my patience game definitely had to be ‘right on’ for these pieces.
Finally , the flower center . I used my most favorite decorative stitch from the Bernina – this is stitch #419 – you may have something similar on your machine.
Lastly, and because Jessica designed so many cute little creatures in her fabric, I placed some fusible web on the wrong side of scrap fabric leftover and fussy cut out some super cute flower circles for the pot and lots of cute creatures to fuse buzzing around the flower pot.
I even added a little extra flower growing near the bottom.
That was super fun ! Be sure to check out all the other projects made with “Juniper” on the Windham Fabrics Instagram feed. And also be sure to enter your name for a giveaway on September 3rd by following all of the “Juniper” bloggers and also Jessica’s Instagram page at Sew Many Creations!
Until your next colour fix~
L&C
We’re one of the last stops on the hop so first let me say – there are giveaways!!! Yippee! Christa and the nice folks at Benartex are giving away an Abstract Garden Fat Quarter Bundle and we here at Colourwerx are also throwing in a pattern pack of the three patterns we used when making the projects you see here: 
UPDATE!! AnneD from @batiksbythebay – you are the randomly selected winner for our Blue Moon Batik Blog Hop – please email or dm me at colourwerx@embarqmail.com with your mailing address to receive your prize!! Thank you to everyone for playing along!! 
To market, to market we go! As always, the Fall Quilt Market was held at the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston. Except this market, someone came knocking early – yup – Hurricane Harvey crashed our quilty party a few months prior. Many of us vendors and many more shop owners and attendees were concerned that either Houston would not recover or that 
the promoters of the Quilt Market would be forced to cancel. Well, I’m happy to report that neither was true and Quilt Market went off without a hitch – and amazingly, there was no sight of any effect from Hurricane Harvey except for upbeat banners and artwork like this one throughout the city! The downtown Houston area was lively and the convention center (which just completed a gorgeous 2 year revitalization) was perfect! And added to this excitement, the Houston Astros were in the World Series! This all made for a very exciting market to say the least!
We also attended our first ever Sample Spree selling already made Mini ModDog samples along with 6 Mini ModDog patterns – this way, shop owners have an already made sample and take it right back to their shop and start selling the patterns – nifty idea, right?!…Here’s Carl, moments before the madness started. Btw, the dog samples were a hit and the shop owners were thrilled to have an already made sample! Below is a slideshow of all the Mini ModDogs samples we put together – we made 2-4 versions of all the styles you see – all in all, we estimated that we stitched up about 45 samples in the weeks prior to market – Wowwee!
Colourwerx 