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It is truly lovely to be back home.  Especially because there were so many nice things waiting for me when I got here. 

Ginny, a reader and fellow embroiderer was kind enough to send me some interfacing she likes to use when embroidering – it adds stability and helps hide those pesky end bits of floss that no matter how hard I try to weave them in the back they still manage to make their presence known. 

Ginny also sent me a Redwood quilt sampler pattern – designed by a Canadian quilter named Jean Boyd.  It is absolutely adorable and I can combine my fledgling embroidery and quilting skills in one project.  In fact it has inspired a quilted table topper (more on that in a sec…).

I received a book in the mail from ~V of Turkey Feathers and Pattern Bee fame.  She had a ‘drawing’ for a book she had just finished and enjoyed so much she wanted to pass it along.  I was actually second runner up since the first drawn name, sadly (for her anyway), was outside the US.  The book is Astrid and Veronika and has been on my ‘to read’ list for ever.  I never win anything so I’m doubly thrilled. 

I’m also going to keep in spirit and pass the book along in the same fashion when I am done with it.  I love the idea of it making its way around blog land like that. 

~V also included a slew of embroidery designs with the book and I now my little head is spinning with embroidery ideas.  This may turn into an embroidery blog after all (not really but it may seem like it for a bit).

So after seeing the Redwork sampler pattern I got the idea for a table topper using a morning glory transfer I’ve had for a while.  I like the simplicity of the Redwork pattern but wanted it to be a little bit larger for a table.  So I came up with a modified version of it.

The embroidered flowers will be in shades of periwinkle and lavender and I’ll find material in those same colors for the scrappy checkerboard effect.  The idea is to have less contrast than the image shows but you get the idea.  It will be contained with a pale green containment border and will have a smaller embroidered morning glory at each corner.  The images here are just clipart and not the actual embroidery pattern.  Just fooling around with Excel – much better use for it than spreadsheets, don’t you think?

Question for the quilters – when you have embroidered blocks in a quilt do those blocks get quilted?  Or no?  I can’t picture how you would quilt it and not have it interfere with the embroidery.  The embroidered blocks will end up being eight inches square – is that too large a block not to quilt?