Friday, March 16, 2012

Frosted Designs Fabulous Friday Challenge - Things with Wings

The Fabulous Friday challenge this week at Frosted Designs is to create a project featuring things with wings - birds, butterflies, bugs, angels, fairies - anything with wings.   For my project, I made a little 12x12 Spring paper "quilt".

I bought this little mini quilt hanger at a local quilt store a few months ago, and each month I make a little seasonal mini-quilt to hang on it.  This month, instead of making a fabric quilt block, I made one from paper and cardstock.
The base is a 12x12 sheet of blue patterned paper, with white zigzag stitching around the edge.  The flowers were cut with my Cricut Expression and the Holiday Cakes cartridge.  I cut the image a few times on various green, yellow and pink patterned papers, to get the appliqued quilt look.  The butterflies were cut from the Walk In My Garden cartridge, with one image adhered flat to the background paper and the other adhered on top, with the adhesive only on the body portion.  The wings were bent up slightly to give a little dimension to the butterflies.   I used the Cindy Loo cartridge for "welcome" and the Stretch Your Imagination cartridge for "spring".   As a final touch, I added some pen stitching with white and black pens and a punched border.  For stability, the blue paper was stitched to a 12x12 sheet of green cardstock with a straight stitch around the previous zigzag stitching.  Little ribbon sleeves were stitched to the green cardstock, and those sleeves slide onto the metal hanger to display the piece. 

Here are some closeups of one of the butterflies and the flowers:

If you don't have a diecutting machine, you can make these paper pieced "quilts" using purchased diecuts and stickers or you can use any applique pattern designed for fabric quilts.  Just cut the pattern pieces from paper instead of fabric and adhere to a paper or cardstock background.  (Note:  depending on the applique pattern, you might have to reverse it first before tracing on your patterned paper.)

We hope you'll share your winged projects at Frosted Designs this week - we'd love to see them!

3 comments:

Mara Campbell said...

Wow! This is an amazing piece! I just love that pretty blue background and all the stitching and flowers. What a unique piece for you home, too. Love it!

Sassy said...

Awesome! Love the idea of quilting. This is Spring!

tellana said...

Oh my - how gorgeous! Such bright and vivid colors!
Hugs,
Liva ❤