Trying New Things

My husband is the most amazing man. One of the many things I love about him is how he always believes that I can do greater things than I think I can. For the past few weeks he's been encouraging me to branch out a little bit from my quilt projects into something new. I had been toying with the idea of making a picture quilt to hang on the wall in the girls' room, but I wasn't sure that my skills were up to it yet. Still my husband insisted that I give it a try, so I dove into the creative process this weekend. The quilt has a princess theme to go along with the Castle Peeps quilts I plan to make for the girls' beds this spring. I sketched out some thoughts on paper and then started blocking out a rough idea of the picture with heaps of fabric on the floor.

After a little editing and adding, I had a bit of a feel for how I wanted the shapes to look. Next I started cutting out the fabric into flat pieces.

Then yesterday, I started sewing those pieces together. It's a bit of a brain teaser because you have to sit down and think about what pieces need to be attached first and so on. There's definitely an order to it.

The castle pieces were not as difficult as the landscape -- all those curved edges give me a minor heart attack. You can definitely see my lack of experience in the occasional puckers. I'm hoping to get some more work done on this tonight so that the basic quilt top is finished and I can start adding the little pieces to the front before starting in on the quilting. Stay tuned...