This piece is backed onto some curtain interlining and then washed in hot water to give it a vintage feel. This particular interlining seems to turn into tungsten steel when you give it this treatment so I thought I would stick to something fairly simple for this piece, a spray of leaves. Once more it is based on a lovely piece by Mandy Pattullo:
Her’s has a lot of dynamism because of the swirl of the quilt piece behind it. Mine is much more stable and sedate:
I wanted to use these lovely purple-y Laura Ashley pieces which were given to me by Gill Bonham, one of the Bristol Quilters. They were mainly quite fine lawn pieces and very easy to applique. I decided to embroider them in pink because of the lovely foliage on some flowers I was recently sent:
I love that pink edge on the shiny strappy leaves. I was wondering what to do lift the piece and I decided to add some buttons:
I am not normally a big fan of buttons, and I do actually know someone who genuinely has a phobia of them, but on this occasion I thought they matched the naive quality of the piece. Furthermore, these all came from my mother-in-law’s button box which I inherited when she died. Most of them are fairly vintage, which fits in with the general theme of the series.
This little piece has some really old Laura Ashley prints. The background has some of what looks like Indian woodblock print and this is some of the first designs the company produced for clothing. The navy and white prints in the above piece are also quite old ones.
It was a delight to do, and I think my hand applique has really improved over the course of this project.
