Banish the Blues

Like some of the rest of you, I had a heck of a time settling on a single idea to turn into my theme piece.  Blue has so many wonderful ways it could be taken - everything from the bluebird of happiness, once in a blue moon, talking a blue stream, blue jeans, blue eyes, the wild blue yonder to blues music and even feeling blue, to name just a few.  I think that last one settled in on me - the January Blues hit and I just could not get motivated.  I pulled some fabric a while back and you saw this:

That wasn't working for me, but then I pulled out some of my indigo pieces from last summer and thought that would be the trick.  I started working away on this one:

But I bit off far too much - deciding to do it all by hand, and while I like it and think it will get finished, it will be a slow hand working project, with no deadlines.

That left me at Friday night with nothing to show.  Back to my blue stash.  So far, I'd been looking at more true blue types of colours.


I needed to charge things up a bit, so I started pulling my brighter blues - the turquoises.  They brighten my spirits.  Add some white, and I'm happy!  Some simple piecing with the thought that I would add some fun and funky embellishments.

Then disaster. see my blog for the details, but lets just say I'm without a machine capable of doing freemotion at this point in time.  :(

Another change of plans ensued, but finally, I got it done!  Luckily, the walking foot worked, and I got to play with that - I've not used a walking foot on a project before to do the quilting.

Banish the Blues

add some self covered buttons with a bit of glitz

mix up the quilting

a self piped binding to finish it off

Nice and bright, and hopefully, those January Blues will be gone for good!