Blooming Marvellous and how I made it

Last year I made this Journal Quilt and I thought I would share the process of getting the quilt to the embroidery stage.

I used the following items
cotton wadding
calico for backing and hand dyed calico for binding
wool tops in buttercup and grape jelly,
hand dyed scrim in red currant and sea green
snippets of purple velvet and purple pink organza
machine embroidery thread
hand embroidery thread

I buy my wool tops from a wonderful shop Twist Fibre Craft which is only half an hour away from Kinross in a beautiful place called Newburgh, Fife ~ they do mail order too!!

I started with a piece of cotton wadding which is lovely and soft to handle, you could use wool prefelt as well but I didnt have any at the time ~ its lovely and soft too.


Next I pulled off some buttercup wool tops and layered them all over the wadding, first horizontally

then I layerd the wool tops on vertically

once the wadding was covered in both directions with wool tops, I moved to my embellisher and continued to embellish the piece all over, if you dont have an embellisher you could also use a foam pad and felt needles and do this by hand, it might take a little longer but will look just as good

embellished all over

now I started to lay on hand dyed scrim in sea green

adding the scrim in red currant

I then embelished the piece all over

Now the piece is embellished all over I decided it needed some more depth at the bottom and top right so I added some more scrim in red currant with little snippets of purple pink organza

this shows where I added extra scrim

I also added some purple velvet snippets

~ this time though I just held them down with pins and didnt embellish them.

I then used the calico for a backing and continued to do free machine embroidery over the piece using coordinating thread to represent the flowers and their stems. Once I was happy with the free machining I added some running stitch and some colonial knots by hand, I prefer these to french knots cause they sit better ~ but its down to preference ~ Check out Sharon B's site for an amazing directory of stitches, a really wonderful resource.


I 'squared' the piece and made some binding with hand dyed calico to neaten the edges sewing this on with the sewing machine and finishing by hand on the back.

I hope this encourages you to have a try ~ Judy x