I dropped the feed dogs...

Today (Monday) was the start of a perfect day. I have the day off and my wife has to work. That means I get to use the sewing room.

I have a wall hanging that I started earlier in September. I knew it needed to be embellished and I thought I would use text to fill in the lighter blocks.

The whole piece has relied on serendipity. I started with a few charm pack blocks. I placed two on top of each other, right sides face up on both, and made a cut across on an angle. I traded one side top for bottom and sewed them together. I mixed the blocks with two others and made the next cut across. I kept changing this until I had something like stained glass. I added two sided pieces to the blocks and joined them in a cross shape and added the background. The background is a variety of strips with the idea that a strip continues behind the cross.

I laid out text vertically and cut stencils with a Silhouette cutting machine. I used fabric markers to color in the stencils on my wall hanging. THEN, I dropped the feed dogs and did free motion quilting in the letters. I was only going to color in the letters this morning, but once I got started I couldn't stop and the next thing I knew it was noon. Some time later I had the binding finished and all before two o'clock.

I think the real reason my wife doesn't want me in the sewing room is because I am not getting any house work done...

This is the fifth wall hanging I have done based on the cross. I will share my earlier ones in another post. At some time in the future, I hope to start publishing patterns for some of my wall hangings.