I made it back home from San Francisco late last night and finished up my 5 x7 "Cilantro" piece today.
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| "Cilantro" by Christina Fairley Erickson Freehand machine embroidery, decorative stitching and freemotion quilted |
Since I already had the machine embroidered cilantro done, all I had to finish up was the background. For this, I started with stitching the name "Cilantro" as I had with my other Salsa pieces. To do this, I printed the word on a piece of paper-piecing paper in a funky font and then just stitched the letters out and tore away to paper. Then I chose a few different decorative stitches to start with. |
| Cilantro freemotion quilting design |
However, I then lay my machine embroidered Cilantro on top of the drawn design. I don't think it was complementary at all! I'd like to try the leaf pattern somewhere, but this wasn't the right place.
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| Cilantro freemotion quilting design with cilantro machine embroidery on top |
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| Background getting filled in with cubing |
So, I decided to check my favorite resource, Leah Day's FreeMotion Quilting Project, and thought that I could slightly modify her "Cubing" design. I worked the design at an angle or on-point, as well as putting in a lot of rectangular shapes, rather than mostly all squares.
After that, I only had to applique down my machine embroidery. Due to the thin stalks and ruffled edges of the cilantro, I decided to cut the embroidery along the edge, color in the edges and machine applique it (rather than hand-applique as I did on the others.) I did put a minimal amount of trapunto batting under a few leaves and left some of the edges loose, so it has a more 3-D effect.
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