Quilt Decor, Stonefields Paper Flowers Appliqué Prep + Hexie Basting Preferences

I have a happy little snippet of renovation progress to share today!  Behold, my in-progress laundry room.  Can you tell a quilter lives here?

Limestone Mosaic Installed Over Laundry Sink

From a distance you might think it's wallpaper, but it's a honed limestone mosaic tile.  It was a splurge but I was helpless to resist (and my husband was foolish enough to send me to the tile showroom unsupervised).  The tile crew installed this on Thursday and it still needs to be grouted.  That brown paper is covering up and protecting my soapstone counter (same color as the dark gray/black squares in the mosaic) and a laundry sink directly beneath the window.  The window trim is only primed right now; it will be painted the same color as the crown molding and the cabinets once the tile installation is complete.  The painters also taped plastic over the window glass.

The tile installers pointed out to me ahead of time that the mosaic pieces are imperfectly cut and the points don't all meet up precisely, but I knew that already from the sample board in the showroom.  Surprisingly, this doesn't bother me -- it's kind of like an old patchwork quilt made out of stone.  I will see this mosaic wall every time I come into my house through the garage and it will make me smile.  💗

 

Imperfections Up Close, Mosaic Installed But Not Grouted

The installers planned and laid out the whole wall on the floor before they started installing.  

Stonefields Blocks 26 + 27 "The Semi Circles"

Hello again, my stitchy friends.  I have two more completed appliqué blocks for my Stonefields sampler quilt project to share with you today, Blocks 26 & 27 "The Semi Circles."  I used a prepared edge starch and press method with Karen Kay Buckley's Perfect Circle templates, glue basted the shapes in place with Roxanne's Glue Baste It, and then stitched the appliqué by hand using YLI 100 wt silk thread.  The Stonefields Quilt is a beautiful antique-inspired quilt pattern written for advanced quilters, with very minimal instructions.  It was designed by Susan Smith and you can get a copy of the pattern on Etsy here (this post contains affiliate links).  You know those people who have been sewing clothing forever, who buy a new dress pattern, study the pattern pieces and then just sew up the dress based on their experience and preferences without reading the instructions at all?  If you can do that with appliqué patterns, then you'll be fine with Stonefields.  I was a little intimidated at first by the lack of instructions but now that I'm getting into it, I'm kind of enjoying the extra challenge of puzzling over each block and thinking through the pros and cons of different methods for turning that line drawing into a finished quilt block.

Completed Stonefields Blocks 26 + 27 "The Semi Circles"

My friend Gretchen who is also making this quilt (in a gorgeous blue and white color scheme) didn't care for this particular block design and she came up with a lovely embroidered block alternative that you can see on her blog here.  I thought the Semi Circles blocks were kind of cute and a nice opportunity to showcase some larger prints in my stash, including this pink and green on white floral that I inherited in a small stash of quilting fabric that belonged to my late mother-in-law.  Pink was her favorite color and I think she would be happy to see that her fabric made it into a quilt, especially as this was an intact fat quarter rather than a scrap from a completed project.  Perhaps she thought it was too pretty and couldn't bear to cut into it.  I can relate to that!  

Selecting Fabrics: Overcut Circles on an Overcut Background Square

With The Semi Circles block, there were no instructions given except for the diameters of the circles.  So I put a lot of thought into how I wanted to make mine.  My background squares were all cut oversized before I started my project and normally I would trim the block to size after stitching the appliqué, but I decided to trim the background square down to 6 1/2" first for The Semi Circles since the appliqué goes all the way to the raw edges of the blocks.  I would not want to be cutting through my completed hand stitching when I trimmed the blocks down.