Crayon Painting and Machine Embroidery

Back in July, I began to work on the samples for this fall's classes. I wanted to do something different...mainly I just wanted to fool around with some things that have been floating in my head for a while. I've always liked crayon painting-I love giving it such a fancy name-(its really just coloring!) and wanted to do something a little more "serious" with the technique.

I got out a Mountain Mist pattern for embroidered blocks that I had used before for my big embroidered quilt...these floral blocks looked perfect for crayon painting.

The top is now sewn together but I'm not sure if I want to add a wide floral border outside the narrow green border or just, once its quilted, use the floral for the binding-sort of a narrow 1/2" border. For once, I do know what I will do with this small wallhanging-its going in the guest room! The walls there are crying out for decorating!

This blue block is just crayoned-not yet embroidered. Actually this block I hand embroidered. I want anyone interested in trying crayon painting to participate in the class and not not take it because of the machine embroidery...personally, I like hand embroidery and I'm not sure it takes that much longer to do on small blocks likes this. (If you enlarge the quilt top pix, you'll see the blocks with the embroidery)

Here's a close up of the first block I did-only one flower has been machine embroidered. I changed the MM pattern a bit-redesigning the basket and how the flowers go into it so that the basket could be appliqued rather than crayoned.

Here's the whole block...if you compare it to the block in the quilt top, you'll see I added some more leaves, etc. to make the block look more balanced.

This was as much fun as I expected...let the artist in you flow-try crayon painting!