Flower Pillow Top - Seeking Opinions!

Waaah new blogger interface ;_;  I don't like change....

Anyways, things have been quiet on the blog front because I haven't been working on anything!  But that changed last night.

Not only did I buy some new batting to replace the one I melted, I also settled on a ocean stitch for my needlepoint so I can move ahead with both projects.

ocean stitch!

In addition, I went to a quilt class that meets once a month to do a different small project to learn techniques.  This month we were making pillows using fusible web applique, which is pretty much my favorite quiltmaking technique.  I worked on the free pillow pattern from Don't Look Now quilts.

I ended up choosing a relatively monochromatic color scheme, which is rare for me, but it was just what felt right.

However, I came to a snarl when I tried to use one of the decorate stitches on my machine for stems.  Even though I had interfacing on, the whole thing puckered terribly.

No, it doesn't just look like that because it hasn't been ironed.

So I just spent the last two hours picking out all of that stitching.  The teacher said try with super stiff stabilizer next time, and suggested I just throw out this piece of fabric and start anew.  Unfortunately I reviewed my finances over the weekend and discovered I'm spending waaaaay too much on quilting, so by gosh I wasn't going to let this piece of fabric go to waste and have to spend more money on a new piece!

So in a bit, if I'm motivated (I probably won't be, let's face it), I'll reattempt the decorative stitching.  In the meantime, I would love advice.

You might have noticed a gap in the center of the pillow top.  There are two little lovebirds that will go there.  Unfortunately I can't decide what color to make them.  I want something that stands out but many things I try just clash with the color scheme.  So below are some options, I would love to hear which looks best or if there's some other color I should try that isn't below.

Also, second question:  I would love to stick some cute buttons on the flower centers, but then this would be very uncomfortable as a real pillow.  So should I go for appearance or functionality?

same blue as in some flower centers

red

peach

similar dark pink to some of the flowers

Animal Alphabet top appliqued!

As I hoped, I finished all of the machine applique on the top today.

I decided to draw all of the animal eyeballs on because I really didn't feel like doing hand-tied french knots on all of them, but I'm wishing a little that I had sewn eyeballs on, because the drawn on one don't look fantastic.  Also some of the eyeballs ended up in weird places, I probably should have drawn them in marking pen before I did in permanent pen.  Ah well, you live and learn!

So without further ado, here are all of the finished animals:

And here's the back of the top, nicely showing all of the stitching I did!

Big Baby Quilt News!

 Well the baby this quilt is intended for was born this week (in my defense, a little early), so I have been spurred to action to try to get this finished asap for her.  Over Christmas I traced out the remaining animals, but since then I have only been working on my needlepoint.  This week I sat down and finished the remaining animals pretty quickly.

pig

quail

rhino (with little birds on their backs)

sharks

turtle

unicorn

vulture

walrus

"x-ray" fish

yak

zebra

Sorry some of these came out blurry, again I'm not that great at photography and I can't tell that they're blurry from my camera screen.  Everybody is done except "i" because I thought the "iguana" actually looked like a chameleon, so I have been attempting to redesign it.

Today I laid out all of the animals on the quilt top!  I hope to finish the iguana today and get everybody ironed in place by the end of the day.  Unfortunately this top is only halfway done...now I need to raw edge applique around every single item on there!  My goal is to do an animal a day and finish the top in another month.  I'll do a very loose quilting stitch so the top stays fluffy and thus quilting should only take a weekend.  Hand stitching the binding should take another week.  So my goal is to have this finished by early to mid March.  We'll see how I do!

Winter Chickadee Wallhanging

I made five of these as Christmas gifts for family.  I loved how photo realistic the pattern was, and it holds a special remembrance of home for me because I spent a lot of time watching the chickadees at our cabin bird feeder, and even once spent half a day enticing them to eat seed of out my hand.

This pattern is also nice as a Christmas gift because it can basically stay up all winter.  The scene was made with ultra-hold fusible web, that is not made to be sewn over.

I really enjoyed assembling the birds.  Each was made up of ten different pieces.  It was fun to start out with ten odd-looking shapes and have them manifest into such a detailed critter!

all three birds fully assembled

All of the fusible web pieces assembled

The assembled quilt top, before quilting and scrollwork was added (by the way, that scrollwork was really painful to cut out)

  After a lot of research, I decided to machine quilt snowflakes into the background.  It was tedious but okay for such a small area.  I stitched holly leaves around the border.

quilting close-up

quilting close-up

This pattern was fun to make, but five was too many.  I'm a little burnt out on quilting for a while!