Liberty Tea

I felt so upbeat and energized after posting yesterday. (Thanks for the lovely comments.) I got inspired to get back to the sewing machine.

I've been thinking about doing a patriotic teacup quilt for awhile. That probably sounds bizarre, but there was the Boston Tea Party and I happen to love tea and love the shape of teacups (or more like mugs, which is how I drink my tea) and it all works for me. (Here's a previous piece on the same theme.) I started the quilt about a year and a half ago as an applique project. Don't think I finished even one block.

So yesterday when I was going on about what other lessons I want in the book, I was thinking of teacups/coffee mugs. And I still had that patriotic tea quilt bubbling in the back of my brain. So I made a patriotic teacup.

I stole letters from out of my lower-case tutorial pile. (I had really been dragging my feet about making them into a sampler, even tho I'd made all the letters of the alphabet already.) I took apart the j to get an i and the q to get another b. Grabbed the leftover L from the Noel Sampler. Then I just had to make two more letters from scratch and I had all the letters I needed to do this:


My letters were definitely getting bigger and bigger as I was going along on that tutorial. That "liberty" just gets big and loud at the end. Decided on a 3" unfinished height and really whacked some of the units down, the t in particular.

I do have all the letters sewn up into words, even tho I'm not sure how I'm going to use them. They may go in a border around teacup blocks or they might be in the interior of the quilt, like they are now. Anyway, I like seeing the words all together and if I decide that part of a word needs to shift elsewhere, it's not a big deal to pick out a 3" seam. Next up I'll make a few more teacups, maybe some fireworks and take it from there.

I love this combination of colors.

In other quilty news, I'm still chugging away on the Terms quilting. It is soooo not fun going over all these stinking seams. I finally decided on the spiral pattern so I'm just going around and around and around, needing fewer fan units every time. I'm halfway up the left-hand side now. I'm amazed at how the fans just disappear into these blocks that have the embroidery floss words quilted in. I was afraid there might be a bit of a clash there, but so far there hasn't. In fact, it's not even worth taking a photo of, cuz you wont' even see the fan quilting.