Two weeks ago my mom and I went to the Quilt Convention in Hampton, Va. We have done this for a number of years and I am always so inspired by other people's work. There are vendors, quilt guilds displaying their guild challenges and anything and everything in between. I took over 300 pictures but I'll save that for another post. Tonight I want to tell you about this wonderful lady I met who does reverse wool applique.
Michelle May is the owner and designer at
The Raspberry Rabbits located in North Carolina. We had a wonderful chat in her booth. I was initially drawn to her pumpkin pattern. As I looked around Michelle started telling me the stories behind each of her works, for example, the pumpkin pattern was named "Peter's Pumpkin" from the nursery rhyme. I did end up buying this pattern along with her adorable book called
Fabled Fusions. The
Peppermint Tea pattern was inspired by Alice in Wonderland's Tea Party and
Wish Upon A Star was inspired by Michelle's love of the Wonderful World of Disney show that she used to watch as a child.
As you all know I like working with upholstery because it adds texture to a piece of work. I told Michelle that I was going to try to make Peter's Pumpkin out of my upholstery stash:
It turned out being a little bit more difficult to work with than I had anticipated because of the many layers of upholstery (including the batting). It was THICK and this was all hand stitched. The backing was a velvet paisley print. I ended up changing the beige background because it was too hard to sew through (as it was leather). In the next picture, you can see that it is off-white wool felt. The first layer of the pumpkin, the brown part, was in fact leather. The second layer was a tweed upholstery and the third layer, orange, was wool felt. The stem was two layers which consisted green velvet and the same brown leather I used for the pumpkin.
In the above picture, the upholstery with a mustard color background had a raised wool design that I cut out and then used for the vine and the decorative pieces at the bottom.
This was so much fun to do! I think my next project is going to be O'Ryan the Stargazer from her book
Fabled Fusions; O'Ryan is the cutest little owl I've ever seen!
