Meet Happy

"Happy" 8X8 Copyright Karen Mason 2012

"Happy" is a small quilt that I created for the Quilting Arts Magazine challenge "What's Your Signature Color?"
My color is blue. The entire quilt is made from various colors of blue with the exception of the orange beak. Orange is the compliment of blue, so I am ok with that.
When I look at my shelf of hand-dyes I see lots of blue. Sky blue, turquoise, blue-greens, navy, and blues that are so subtle they look like white.  Even my bead collection is filled with different shades of blue. I love blues.
This quilt gave me the opportunity to try a new technique. I like to piece my backgrounds, and in my opinion fusing onto a pieced background creates a huge problem, the texture of the piecing shows through the fused piece. I am very picky and don't like the way it looks. In this piece I used fusible interfacing on the back of the applique piece bird, sewed it down and then trimmed away the background from behind.
The photo is not that great, I realized it after I completed the quilt, I will take better photos next time I use this method. The interfacing is on both the bird applique and the background. The other thing I like about this method is that the quilt is not as stiff as a typical fused quilt. I still like to fuse, I am just going to use it for the smaller elements in my quilts. In this quilt the eye, beak, legs and grass are still fused. If I were to do it again I would use the interfacing on the grass too. I am starting to look to whimsy in creating my designs. I am having fun with this series and will share the first "Bluebird of Happiness" quilt in my next post.