A Wildabon Beginning

It’s summertime!  Time to be outdoors, making memories, and enjoying the blue skies.  And flowers.  It’s always time to enjoy flowers!  I realized that during the summer I largely hand sew, which usually means applique.  As you know, applique and flowers are always a lovely combination.  So don’t be shocked that I’m popping in with another applique project!  As a longtime fan of both Leah Duncan and Carolyn Friedlander, I rushed to purchase the Wildabon pattern years ago when it was released.  I also bought a kit, a rare thing for me.  Then I procrastinated and never made it.  Now, at last, I have a Wildabon beginning!

I struggled with fabric selection at first.  I weighed using the fabrics in the kit, or using Liberty lawn for this project.  For a while I thought I would just make two of them.  Then I realized how many things I want to make, and I don’t think I’ll end up making two of these.  So I added Liberty fabrics to the Carolyn Friedlander lawns.  My version has more small flowers than the original, because I kept adding more Liberty prints!

I started in the corner with the blues, and have been making my way around the small flowers first.  You can see that I’ve stitched some of them down already.

This pattern calls for thread basting.  When I thread baste, I stitch 1/4″ away from the edge of the fabric I’m appliqueing to the background.  You can see my running stitch 1/4″ in from the edge of the orangey red fabrics below.  Then, when I applique, I simply turn the raw edge under 1/8 inch.  This raw edge meets the running stitch and helps me get a good fold to stitch down.  After I stitch the entire piece down, I simply remove the basting stitch.

I thread baste most of the time when I applique.  Something I particularly love about it is that my fabrics won’t shift after I baste them in place.  I can fold, wad, wrinkle, and generally wrangle my base fabric as much as needed.  That applique piece won’t move if it’s thread basted.  Thread basting makes travel easy and worry-free for my project.

This is a wholecloth quilt, approximately 45″ square.  I confess that stitching lawn to this heavy background isn’t easy.  But look at all the pretty prints I added!  It will be fun to continue stitching on my Wildabon beginning throughout the summer.