Colour My World Purple

Doing the happy dance! Doing the happy dance! I am soooo doing the happy dance right now! I'm loving my tulip -- it looks exactly as I envisioned it. I can't believe I managed to make something that looked like what I saw in my head. This tulip was on my bucket list (#34/35) and now it's done!

For this mini quilt, I used the technique I learned in Elaine Quehl's Collage Tree class that I attended in January. Thank you, Elaine! It was perfect for what I wanted to do with this month's challenge. It is more elaborate than I had envisioned with the overall Colour My World challenge and I certainly don't think I'll be doing such detailed minis for the rest of the months, but I love this one!

Once I finished the tulip, I placed it on some black cotton and then did some thread sketching. I haven't done much thread painting before, but it was so fun and so forgiving! There's so much go it that if there's a wobble here or there, doesn't matter because you can use go back over it. I used white, light variegated purple, dark purple variegated, medium purple and dark purple threads for the thread painting on the tulip and dark green, olive, and light variegated green threads for the stem. A piece this size didn't take very long either.

Thread painted tulip

Detail of the thread painting on the stem

Detail of the thread painting on the tulip

The back of the thread painted tulip - I switched to black at one point

Then I cut out the tulip from the black and attached it to the plum purple background (Option 1 -- thanks for the advice!) with an invisible hem stitch. The plum background gives it a bit more contrast and brings out the plum highlights in the tulip. Then came a bit more thread painting and the quilting, which was just wavy lines that I though complemented the variegated background. I finished the edges with a zig zag and straight stitch because I don't know how I want to use all these challenge pieces.

And voilà! My little purple tulip quilt is 14.5" square unfinished. 

Now it's your turn -- I can't wait to see what you've done!

Like I did last month, I made a board on Pinterest for quilts that use purple, if you want see what others have done with this royal colour.

March's colour is black. I'll do a post early next week with some tidbits about black. What would you do with black?

EDITED: Speaking of purple, I'm also linking in to TGIFF!, which is over at Quokka Quilts this week. Check out Laura's great alphabet top and the other finishes and link up one of your own, if you have one.



P.S. It's official, the next to succumb to the sickness is the hubster. Poor guy!