Finally Finished

I was in two minds whether to blog about these before or after the show, but the reason things have been quiet here is that I’ve been working on couple of entries for the British Quilt and Stitch Village, the postal deadline for which was this week. After a couple of weekends of continual sewing, I finally finished them late on Sunday night and got them in the post on Monday morning. Unfortunately these photos will have to do until after the show as I had to spend most of Sunday burying ~500 ends (I'm not sure I want to know exactly how many!) and I only had time to grab a few photos on Monday morning before having to leave for work and the post office.
   

The pouch (for the three dimensional category) is made of silk dupion EPP diamonds and is hand quilted with silk thread. It is filled to overflowing with Suffolk puffs and is supposed to represent treasure at the end of the rainbow. The flag is for the special theme category (British Royalty) and is made of ~1300 half-inch EPP hexies. It is quilted in red, white and blue with 40 wt Aurifil in the needle and 50 wt Aurifil in the bobbin. The VR and ER signify the current and future longest serving British monarchs and my thinking was that the mix of traditional Liberty prints and modern metallics, along with traditional EPP and modern machine quilting would reflect how British royalty have to balance the traditional with the modern.

The flag took much longer to complete than anticipated, particularly burying all the ends, and by Sunday evening I just wanted the thing finished which probably means the latter stages could have been done a lot better. Even just looking at the photos now, I can spot several hexies where the colour contrast could be improved and I'm sure my binding technique is not up to quilt show standards.

These projects have taken up all of my sewing time for the past few months and now they are finished, I’m at a bit of a loss as to what to do next. I think it could be time to start my husband’s quilt and which involves no hexies or hand sewing at all.