Persian Shield - Project Quilting

"Persian Shield," 19.5" x 33", made for Project Quilting, Season 6, Challenge 3: UFOs and Orphan Blocks,
Feb. 2015 in Yellow Springs, Ohio

Challenge recap for  "UFOs and Orphan Blocks":

A UFO is an UnFinished Object and an Orphan Block is any block or piece of block that has not yet been put into a project (including cutoff half square triangles). You are encouraged to make something different than you had originally intended.

I thought this was an interesting challenge, but because last year my goal was to finish my UFOs and my Orphans either get absorbed into other quilts or they get filed in the scrap bin by color, I don't have any UFOs and very few Orphans.

When I looked in my "Possible Projects" pile, I did find these:

Sixteen half-ovals, half primarily green and half primarily purple, made up of strip piecing. I got these from another quilter, so they aren't even my Orphans. I'm not even sure what they were left over from, I just liked the color combinations.

I started by piecing one green half-oval with a purple half-oval, although I tried to not have the seam exactly in the center. I spent awhile fussing with the placement of them on the back ground fabric then pin basted everything.

The oval shapes were attached during the quilting process with a squiggle in the middle of each one with varigated purple yarn and also appliqued around the raw edges.

Then I couched a dark multi-color yarn across the middle of the ovals but also extending out to the edges of quilt and I couched a green yarn around the oval shapes themselves. And take it from me, you don't want to just couch the yarn around the outside and hope that also catches the edges of the appliqued shape, you want to applique the shape down first and then couch the yarn on top.

I actually sewed down the pieces and couched them one at a time so I could hide the yarn edges under the piece that overlapped it. For the last piece there wasn't anywhere to hide the tails so I used a needle with a large eye to hide the tail in with the batting.

I used a knife-edge binding/facing technique and the backing fabric even that had leaves on it.

A "Persian Shield" is a plant that has purple-toned leaves. This quilt can also hang horizontally, makes the leaves look even more like shields. If you think the leaves look kind of like footballs, all I can say is that the challenge was posted on Super Bowl Sunday. Come to think of it, they kind of look like UFOs, also.

I also used this backing fabric in the Project Quilting Tree's challenge quilt "Birches" and the dark, multi-colored yarn was used in the Project Quilting Sunrise/Sunset challenge quilt "Sunrise Celebration." 

This is not the first time I've made a quilt from another quilter's Orphan Blocks. In "All the Colors" I used batik half-square triangles that someone gave me.

More about Persian Shield

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 Click on any of the photos to see larger images.

To read more about Project Quilting, go here.

To see other entries for this challenge, visit the UFOs and Orphan Blocks link up.