Piquant Progress

Piquant:
1.  agreeably pungent or sharp in taste or flavor; pleasantly biting or tart
2.  agreeably stimulating, interesting, or attractive

Doesn't that word just make your mouth feel a little strange, but good?  I'm working on my projects this weekend and am faced with a little sense of this odd flavor treat as I work on my "Onion" for the Salsa series.  I did something a little different from my Tomato and Tomatillos on this piece.  Rather than having everything be freehand machine applique, I put a layer of organza for the sliced face of the onion and just sewed in the lines of the layers of the onion.  This gives it a translucent, shiny appearance, like a real onion.

Now that I have the onion finished, I need to make the background on which to applique it. I'm a little unsure how I'm going to do the trapunto on this one, as it has a real sense of depth with each onion behind the other.  I'll have to think on that.  I should have it finished in the next couple days and will post the rest of the pictures from the process of making it.

First two rows stitched together

I'm also finally starting to get my Waterfall quilt UFO pieced together.  I'm planning to try our a quilt-as-you-go method, per Leah Day from her Freemotion Quilting Project.  I've put together these two rows and plan to quilt 2 rows together at a time.  I've been thinking I'd use Leah's "Mesh Curtain" design to quilt this, but I'm a little worried that it will be too busy or will dominate the quilt, making the color shifts and curved pieces less noticeable.  Any thoughts or suggestions on how I should quilt it? Waterfall quilt UFO on the design wall (some pieces have now been changed.)

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Curved Piecing Tutorial - Waterfall Quilt

Last week I promised to get back to my UFO "Waterfall Quilt."  Well, I've made some progress with it:

Waterfall Quilt last week

Waterfall Quilt this week

One of the waterfall squares with
curved piecing

As you can see, I've added a couple rows (and I obviously need to get a larger design wall that my pieces can stick to!)  More importantly, I think, is that I removed pieces that I felt didn't really work, either due to the patterning of the material, or more likely, the color flow wasn't right.  Actually, now that I look at the photograph, I see a few other pieces that I'll probably switch out, since they don't have quite the right value. I call this my waterfall quilt as I wanted the curved pieces to make it feel like water trickling down, as well as the blues and greens to represent the water and surrounding forest.

I thought you might like to find out how I do the curved inserts which I'm working on adding to all the blocks. Believe it or not, it's a fairly simple process.  Certainly simpler than doing the video... so please excuse me if my videography needs a little perfecting!

For other interesting blogs and tutorials:

Check out how other quilters are finishing up their UFO's on Leah Day's Freemotion Quilting Project

Carol's portrait of Max, a yellow lab shows a great progression for doing a pictorial quilt.

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