Another finish--Serengeti

"Serengeti," designed by Toni Whitney (see post for info)

Yippee! I can add another finish to my list! I had a day off Friday after my trip to Phoenix and was so jet-lagged that I wasn't up to much except sewing. Or, at least, I had the right kind of sewing I could do while jet-lagged. Perhaps that's more accurate. In any case, between Friday, Saturday, and about an hour on the binding today, I was able to finish the Serengeti project in time for it to head off to college with my daughter. A week early, even! Woohoo!

To give you some perspective, this finishes about 26"x 24". I highly recommend Toni Whitney designs, and the kits for them through Bigfork Bay Cotton Company. The pattern was extremely well written and included all the drawings for the pieces in such a way that it was very easy to figure out which pieces were supposed to be done in which fabric, and in what order to fuse them down. As I have said before, I went ahead and bought the kit instead of just the pattern--it saved a tremendous amount of time trying to find the right fabrics, and I'm really not sure it was much more expensive than having done it all on my own would have been. Since this was to be a piece for my daughter's enjoyment and nothing that I intended as a piece that would show off my own talent, such as it is, I was fine with doing this one by kit. Usually picking out fabrics is my favorite part of a project, but this particular project would have made me crazy. I know my limits.

This pic shows a little of the detail of my stitching around the edge of each piece. The pieces are all fused down and it's not the kind of thing you'd do much quilting on (unless you wanted to really go to town with bringing out detail of fur with thread, I suppose), so you stitch down every one of those tiny little pieces to make sure they'll really stay put.

Then you put the backing on and quilt the borders. I just did a very simple stitch-in-the-ditch on the two narrow inner borders, and as simple as I could get in the outer border. Partly, I wanted to get the thing done so I didn't want to spend a lot of time on the borders, and partly I really wanted the focus to stay on the very cool and majestic lion.

I enjoyed doing this, and learned some things along the way. That being said, I'm also thrilled it's done. It'll be awhile before I tackle something that requires tweezers to move itty bitty pieces into place again.