Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Dancing Umbrellas

Happiness is having my daughter living within an hour of my home. This is quite a change from driving two entire days to visit when she lived in Chicago. Double happiness is having a daughter who loves to sew as much as I do (and is just as addicted to fabric as I am)! She and I frequently meet at our favorite fabric store, Painted Pony and Quilts (http://ppnq.com) in League City, Texas. A few weeks ago, we found this adorable quilt pattern at Painted Pony.
It's called "Dancing Umbrellas" from www.laundrybasketquilts.com. Shopping with my daughter makes me want to do a happy dance, just like these umbrellas -- and she loves "Singing in the Rain" so I just could not pass this one up!

Usually, my quilts are much brighter than the suggested fabric for this pattern so I hit my stash as soon as I got home. I decided on black and white background squares with one unexpected square:
Umbrellas in bright primary colors brighten any rainy day. I usually piece my quilts but this one is appliquéd, so I had to refresh my skills in that department. For that I found an excellent tutorial online at sewlikemymom.com/applique-tutorial-curves/. I've just about completed all the applique work, and I'm ready to sew the blocks together. So that I won't get the blocks out of order when I take them down from the design wall, and so that I can keep the umbrellas correctly oriented and "dancing" in the right direction, I basted a label to the bottom left of each block. Here's my progress so far:
Now, the big question is how to quilt it? I know I will echo quilt around each umbrella shape, but I think I want raindrops around the umbrellas. I'll be quilting on my longarm machine, so does anyone have suggestions for quilting raindrops without a millions stops and starts? Maybe diagonal lines accented with raindrop shapes?