July's piece is finished!

It's the end of another month and another BJP piece is finished. I feel both exhilarated and sad. There were a few things I added to the piece since my last post. I sewed the shells onto the bottom of the sand. I am happy with how these shells finally look, but it was a struggle to make the large black shell secure. This was a learning curve that I hope to be able to practise again in future pieces.

After seeing the piece on the computer screen while writing my last blog entry, there were a couple of things that I have been thinking about how to improve.

#1) was the bar of blue fabric (which I thought stood out too much) on the top right. I put a little bit of blue Angelina fiber on top of that section, then I finished beading the blue wave. This helped with problem #2) which was that the blue wave (cheesecloth) looked too thick/heavy to me. I trimmed that wave a bit, and with the Angelina on top, it looked better. Issue #3) was the thread that I used in quilting the horizontal line that went across my son... I thought that stood out too much. So I sewed on more clear beads and like it better. The photo on the left is the unbeaded quilting line, and on the right is the beaded quilting line. Can you see the difference?

I also tried two different beading ideas on the right. On the left of my son, I beaded slightly above and below the line and on the right of my son, I beaded on the line. I like the way the left stitching blurs the line. Good thing for me to know for another time!

And after all of those little alterations, I declared my MJP piece "finished"!

I feel the need to acknowledge the learning I acquired from Myrna Giesbrecht through her course on "Self Expression" for quilters. I learned how to trust my inner voice, how to deal with my dissatisfaction when a piece doesn't look like my 'ideal', and how to work with my ideas through the process of creating a piece from start to finish. I feel like all that learning that I have been working on for the past 2 years, paid off while working on this quilt.

I did some hand stitching with DMC floss to hold the 3 layers together (beaded top, batting, and backing) and then turned the edges in. It's a little wonky on the right edge, but my new motto is "finished is preferable to perfect"! Then I beaded the edges, blue beads on the top half and sand coloured beads on the bottom half.

I call it "A Place to Begin".