May OMG accomplishments

May was a good month quilt wise.  I had three things that I wanted to accomplish.  The first was my mini quilt swap project, the second was my Milkweed 3 piece and the last was a design for my Cherrywood Challenge.

In January I signed up for the Canadian Quilters Association Mini Quilt swap.  I chose to swap by mail as I hadn't planned to attended the conference.  The conference has subsequently been cancelled due to the current COVID-19 pandemic and all the swaps are being done by mail.  The mailing date is June 1st.  My partner and I decided to exchange table runners rather than wall hangings.  The maximum size of wall hanging was 24" square.  I had a list of colours and shapes my partner likes and in an email conversation learned some of the designers she likes.  The starting point was dragon flies.  When I think of dragonflies I think of waterlilies so I needed a pond.  I decided my pond should have a field of flowers and my table runner was born.  It was completed May 24th and mailed the next day -- a week early.  It has arrived safely at its destination so I'm including a photo of the completed runner.  My partner mailed her runner to me the same day but it is still in the postal system.  Hopefully it will come this week.  It was a fun experience .

For my Milkweed 3 piece I wanted to get the Caterpillar and Butterfly made and to then finish the piece.  Over the course of the month I did get the caterpillar and butterfly created for my Milkweed 3 piece.  This is the third in a series of pieces that resulted from the Abstracting from Nature Workshop that I took last December with Jane Sassaman.  The caterpillar and butterfly are drawn from photos I took last summer and then coloured with pigma and sharpie markers.  Once completed, I arranged all the pieces on my design wall and took a photo.  There are a lot of individual elements to put up so rather than trying to arrange them on the potential backgrounds, I took a photo of the layout and came up to the laptop and opened photoshop.  

Using the select tools, I selected and removed the design wall background in photoshop then add photos of all the background fabrics I was considering.  By adding them into photoshop in a layer below the selection, I was able to get an idea of what the elements would look like on each fabric. If I liked the fabric, I selected the background fabric and element layers and pressed ctrl + alt + e to create a stamp of the layer that I saved for comparison purposes.  

Photoshop background removed.  

Eventually I narrowed it down to two that I liked.  When I made the tracing of the layout for positioning purposes, I laid that over the two candidates.  I wasn't sure that the photos I was using for the backgrounds had stayed at 100% so wanted to see the relative sizes against the background designs.   I didn't like how the elements worked with my first choice but did like it with my second choice so then moved the elements onto the actual fabric.  It still worked well so the background was chosen.  A little tedious but done.  

The fabric was a little bit short so I used the trick for diagonal backs to make it a bit taller but still have a bit of width.  The diagonal was created so that most of it falls behind the flower elements.  On Thursday and Friday Elaine had a virtual quilting retreat.  Its still going on this weekend.  I joined the call and had a good time stitching the elements together and starting to stitch them to the background.  I just need to finish the decorative stitching on the two bunches of flowers. I'm hoping to get the top finished by the end of Sunday and to be able to quilt it early next week.  

My other goal for May was around the Cherrywood challenge.  I spent some more time with it last weekend and had an idea and a drafted a design.  Its been sitting for several days while I think about it but I believe it will work so I think I'm in good shape for that.  

Linking up with Patty's OMG finishing party.