February Challenge Finished

Yesterday I showed January's piece. Today I can show you February's piece.

I didn't want to show it till my recipient had seen it, but she has it now, so I'm here to tell about it.

I made this for my friend, Stephanie, who's had a pretty rough and stressful year so far, so I thought she could use a friendly heart, especially one that bore some messages of encouragement.

First, I made a white fabric background. This will have specific significance to Stephanie, because I made it using leftovers from a block I made for the Two's Company Quilt Bee that she and I are in together.

I quilted this background piece, and then added all the other stuff on top of it while it was already quilted.

I made red fabric and cut my heart out of that and appliqued it on.

At this point, I went ahead and put the binding on the quilt, since all that was left was embellishment-type things.

I attached a ribbon to the background with little tiny buttons on top, which you can't see in my picture, to make it look like the heart was hanging. I added a key charm hanging from the ribbon.

Then I used cardboard rectangles and scrapbooking paper to make the individual quote posters to hang on the quilt. I printed out the three quotes I wanted to use on my printer, then cut them up and embellished them. Then I had My Cowboy drill holes through them so I could run the thread through.

I attached the thread (which is just perle cotton) to the quilt, then ran the ends through the drilled holes, and tied the cards to the quilt. I put little beads on the ends of the strings, tied knots, and fluffed them up.

I thought about adding even more embellishment, but decided to quit while I was ahead, and it looked OK to me. Sometimes I get carried away and do too much!

Then I mailed it off to Stephanie. And after it was already in the mail, I realized that I hadn't put anything on the back for it to hang by. I'm so sorry, Stephanie . . . you'll have to add that part yourself to get it to hang!

Stephanie has blogged about it: Stephanie's Heart Quilt, and she has much better pictures of it than I do, if you'd like to see some other shots of the quilt.