CQJP November and December

 

This afternoon, I went to see the new movie, Les Miserables. It was very good, but you’ll want to bring a few Kleenex when you go see it. Although it is a sad movie, it has wonderful themes of forgiveness and redemption. Anne Hathaway did a fabulous job singing Fantine’s songs.

 
In all the fun of the Easy Street Mystery, I have not forgotten about my Crazy Quilt Journal Project. While we were at the Farm over Christmas, I finished both my November and December blocks. For my November fan block, I got the idea for all of the seam treatments from Carole Samples’ book, Treasury of Crazy Quilt Stitches, although I altered some of them for my purposes and added beads and buttons.
 

In the center arc, I stitched the city and state where we live, but I’ve blurred that out in photo shop. We have lived in this city the entire 22 years we’ve been married. It’s where Mike was offered a teaching job after he graduated from college.

 

The left seam has silk ribbon flowers with pearl centers. The next seam has two different zig-zag seams, using a thicker velvet thread and a thin embroidery floss, topped with two different sized beads. The lace towards the bottom has gold triangle beads in the bottom holes. Small transparent seed beads attach the top of the lace to the block.

The next seam has a wavy fishbone “vine” with silk ribbon buds made of French knots. The final seam is a zig zag made of chain stitches, topped with mother of pearl buttons and seed beads.

The larger lace around the outside of the fan has cream-colored beads in the little holes near the bottom and transparent beads in the center of the swirl.

My December block is Mike’s and my monogram. I know this doesn’t really look like a crazy block, but it’s going to be the center block out of 25 for my anniversary quilt. In Penny McMorris’ book, Crazy Quilts, there’s a photo of an antique crazy quilt that has a monogram in the center. I like the look. It gives the eye a bit of a rest among all the beautiful busy-ness of the rest of the quilt.

I enlarged the letters from an alphabet that’s in the back of Carole Samples’ book, Treasury of Crazy Quilt Stitches, making the S in the middle larger than the M and the J. I traced the letters onto dupioni silk using a thin Pigma Micron pen.

Confession time: I started stitching this block back in about January. I find doing this much satin stitch by hand to be rather monotonous, so I’ve been slowly working on it all year. It was a relief to finish it this week!

Head on over to the CQJP 2012 blog to see other eye candy. Lots of people have finished up their year-long projects.

Happy stitching!