Just a Little Bit Crazy!

Crazy quilting is my first love, has been since I was a little girl it's the first stitching I remember my grandmother teaching me.  Years later my father came to visit, he left a paper wrapped package on my guest bed with instructions to wait to open it till later.  It was a wool crazy quilt done by the church ladies at my grandparents church, the embroidery included their names and it means the world to me.  When we started talking about making new examples for our booth, I knew I just had to make a crazy quilted piece.
Recently we got our first copies of Embroidered Memories by Brian Haggard and I remembered meeting him a couple of years ago at the National Quilt Association Convention in Columbus, OH.  He was there promoting his first book Crazy Quilted Memories, I remember looking at it, thinking I could never work in such a muted color palette.  Remember "never say never", so I thought this would be a good challenge for me.  Confession; I absolutely loved making this quilt.
                                                                                  
First, I grabbed one of our Tea Dye Bundles, it turned out to be the perfect starting point to jump off from.  I had just dyed Osnaburg in carmel, it had such a great old-fashioned texture I knew it would make a perfect border.  From that point I just raided our hand-dyed textures for anything that might work....burlap, flannel, organdy and kona cotton.  Next decision was to piece it in a simple log cabin style crazy block, with the photo as the center.  The photo was printed on Jaquard Inkjet Silk, which has a luscious sheen.

This piece of a doily under the photo of my grandmother was what was left-over from making an apron.  Now for the "just a little bit crazy" part...I was bound and determined to not loose the wonderful scalloped edge by stitching it in as you would normally piece a crazy quilt.  Actually lost a whole nights' sleep trying to work out how to leave it as a "flap"...you can see below that lose of sleep was not for nothing.  Everyone just has to pick it up to see what's under it.

Below on the right hand edge are felt applique flowers as seen in Brian's first book, the dimension and texture they add are really great. They also gave me the perfect place to show off vintage mother of pearl button's from my grandmothers button jar.

On the left hand side of the block below is a feather stitch vine stitched using our Bark Pearl Cotton in size 5, the sheen and colors are a great addition to this piece, as is the vintage crochet flower. 

   Come back again to see what else we created using our hand-dyes.