Shared Inspirations

Many of you have heard of my good friend Karen Azevedo...I have featured her beautiful work on linens many times.  She is as obsessed as I am with the linens and we have lots of fun exchanging goodies that we've bought and enjoy bragging rights when one of us gets something and the other doesn't!

I came up with a crazy idea this past Christmas after snagging a beautiful pair of pillow coverings off of Ebay.  The idea was to send her one of the pillow coverings and we each spend the following year creating a special piece for ourselves.  We're to document what we do and how we do it...I thought you might enjoy our journey too as it will give you some great ideas on how to handle a piece such as this.

This is how the pillowcases looked when I received them.  The middle was quite poofy and unsquare and the lace was heavily ruffled.  This just wouldn't work for a flat quilt!

I absolutely LOVED the lace inserts with all the pintucking...none of which was square either...remember we call this charm...:)

I carefully trimmed off the ruffled lace...

but ended up with a piece that was still rumpled and full in the middle.  

I wet the piece and VERY CAREFULLY and gingerly blocked this on my design wall.  It didn't come out perfectly square but it was SO much better than it was originally.

I then pressed and reattached the unruffled lace that I had previously taken off.  I mounted the whole piece onto a piece of beautiful tan/gray linen and pin basted with a full thickness wool batting.

Because this fabric is so dense I was very concerned about the pin holes that would be left after pin basting so I was very careful to place the pins where there would be a quilting line.  

I quilted all my large main designs first to anchor everything down...once this was completed I removed every single safety pin.  Once the main lines were finished I went back in and am randomly picking motifs in the middle and quilting those down...again working from large to small.  By the way, my design came from a series of recently purchased books on Boutis...This is something that Karen does by hand and I loved her books so much I had to buy them myself.  The design is extremely detailed and small but I LOVE how this is coming out!

Karen's piece was mounted on top of a beautiful soft pink Dupioni silk.  LOVE the designs she chose!  She is doing her piece on her longarm.  As you can see she has quilted down her large motifs first and will work her way down to the smaller ones.  She's told me she has loads of feathers in store for the vines, etc. 

I will post on our progress as things move along but thought you would enjoy seeing  our progress so far!

Hugs, Cindy :)