Analogous Color Studies Continue

Analogous colors...they are colors that are right next to each other on the color wheel. Above is an example of a very warm palate. (It is August after all)!  Orange, red orange, red.  The pinks are tints of red and give the block added interest.

Analogous colors in Nature.  Red, red-violet, purple.  Warm colors moving toward cool colors.

And finally, the entire color wheel -- pincushions embroidered with summer flowers.

I do love color!

There will be one more post in this series in September. That one will show my finished Summer Challenge Analogous Color Quilts.

Half Square Triangle Embroidered Mini Quilt Completed

I've completed up my Half Square Triangle Embroidered Mini Quilt. It finished at 12 1/2 x 13 inches.  I'm so happy with these embroidered flower designs which I found in Kazuko Aoki's book, The Embroidered Garden.

I really like the front of this little quilt. As I showed in my last post, some of the threads from the flower embroidery are hidden inside the the quilt. I wanted to use the flower stems as part of this little quilt's quilting. I used two stitches for the stems--the running stitch which has gaps between each stitch and the back stitch. The running stitch looks like quilting stitches on the back of the quilt. The back stitch really doesn't look good.

I'm not unhappy about the back since this is a quilt that will be used as a wall hanging.  But if I were doing it again, I'd just use a running stitch for all the flower stems.

Half Square Triangle Mini Quilt with Embroidered Flowers--WIP

I'm currently working on a Half Square Triangle (HST) mini quilt made with more left over triangles from another quilt made with the stitch and flip method of block construction.  These HSTs finish at 2 inches square.

I had a idea about embroidering flowers, peaking out in the white patches but hidden by the colored triangles. It was an interesting idea, but when I found the designs I wanted to embroider, it made more sense just to work on the surface.

I embroidered just the flowers through the top of the quilt and the batting, saving the stems to use as part of the quilting. That worked really well. The colored threads are buried in the back of the batting and so aren't visible on the front of the piece. Here's a look "behind the scenes" on the back of the batting.

I learned to embroider in school in second grade, so it's an established skill. But I decided to look around the internet to see if I could find some inspiration and new ideas. 

I discovered a beautiful book, The Embroidered Garden: Stitching Through the Seasons of a Flower Garden, by Kazuko Aoki.  This is such a lovely book. I highly recommend it if you are interested in embroidering flowers. All her embroidered pieces are together in the front half of the book, with detailed stitching instructions in the back of the book.

I drew my flowers, one at a time as I worked, with a fading marking pen, using her embroidery as a guild. I needed to redraw portions of some flowers because the pen faded faster than I could stitch! I used flowers from two of her Summer Garden pieces to make my design, but I didn't very stray far from her beautifully balanced floral compositions. My embroidery design clearly echoes hers.

I'm nearly done!  I'll show the completed mini quilt in my next post.