Take It Further - May block

Well, here is my May TIF block finally finished! Still behind, I must move on now to embellishing the June block which I have already pieced. But first a few details.

Firstly, this is the first month that I have not used ANY of JBM's fabric line. When I considered the colors, this iris print almost jumped off the shelf and landed on my cutting station. It has two of the May TIF colors in it and I found it to be just perfect. Fabrics in the upper right and upper left corners simply were obvious choices and matched the posted colors. The batik in the lower left fell into place as did the pale blue from the Fairy Frost fabric line.

Now for some detail pictures....

Here you can see this month's spider and web done over the iris print. I used blue metallic Kreinik blending filement for the web and stitched the spider using 1 strand of navy blue silk floss.

Here you see in the upper right a beaded summer sun. I found a bag full of these metallic trim pieces at a garage sale a few days ago and thought one would be most appropriate for the May block because May was a tremendously hot month here in Northern California. The center of the sun is a vintage gold Swarovski Lochrosen rhinestone. The rest of the beads are just gold seed beads. The seam treatment below the sun is one from my collection of vintage stitches.

On the upper left of the block I have appliqued an image on cotton that was an online freebie from Janet at Vintage Vogue some time back. Mother's Day for me was a quiet one this year with the exception of 3 phone calls from the 3 daughters. I really miss not having my Mum around to send flowers to and make calls to on Mother's Day.

On the lower right area of the block I placed a remembrance yellow ribbon and flag for Veteran's Day in honor of all our veterans but especially for the many men in my family who have fought long and bravely in wars from the Revolutionary War to present. There are too many names or I would have stitched them all in this patch. A few of the recent ones are Papa T, Uncle Roy, and my brother.

I think the seam treatment shown here turned out particularly well. It is also a copy from my collection of vintage stitch combinations.

Scroll down to my posts from the past couple days to see more close up details, ok?

Stich On!

May Take It Further Sneak Peek!

Here's a little sneak peek at the work I've done on my May Take It Further Challenge block. I have fallen behind on this challenge for a couple reasons but am now trying to catch up and hope to have this block done this week. I already have the June block pieced, so it's all about embellishments until I catch up and move on to the July challenge which Sharon will post on July 1st.
And here's a little bearded iris motif. This is one of the 4 designs included in the Summer Creativity Challenge on the Hand-embroidery list at yahoogroups. When I needed a motif for this iris-centered block (another hint there....) I copied the iris motif at 50% and it fit perfectly! It is done with one strand of silk floss and I back stitched it. I am less than happy with how the backstitching through tissue paper turned out. It was kind of an experiment. Next time I'll use outline stitch for sure.

Stay Tuned & Stich On!