A Story About Some Not-So-Pretty Quilt Fabric, and Some Really Pretty Brazilian Dimensional Embroidery

I had this idea to stitch a Brazilian dimensional embroidery design on cream poplin and make a little art quilt. So I went in search of fabric that would coordinate. I'm trying to avoid the word "ugly", but these are definitely NOT my colors. Here's what I found:

eeuw. But it had "strips", which is a good quality to have in quilt fabric as I understand it.

So I bought it anyway.

OK. So I worked on it a little in my photo editing program. But I was still unsure.

--until I found green. (I guess you know by now that I'm not A TRUE Quilter.) But I took it home, decided to pull out my EdMar rayon floss.

Oh, yes. Now that is more like it (above). 

But THESE are my colors:

Yum.
   I have discovered something during my adventures of sewing pieces of fabric together and naming them "quilt". If you are thinking, in any way, of quilting your finished Brazilian embroidery, it's always a good idea to go fabric shopping first, and THEN match your floss.

It was a major disciplinary effort for me to avoid adding any form of BLUE to my work. Now I'll show you a picture of my little BDEIG art quilt, all finished. In my next post, I'll add some pictures and tell you a little about what I did (hints and tips, you know!). I made this little quilt because I wanted to use my little ABCs for Brazilian Dimensional Embroidery designs with all of the bugs, bees, birds, cats, hedgehogs and other miscellaneous creatures (from one of my books that is out of print at the moment), and that's what I did  See:

I was surprised when I didn't use the narrow fabric print strips, how pretty the wider floral looked. Here's a detail photo:

Now I'll write about the flowers. These are all the original Brazilian embroidery flowers. Back in the days before people were educated about copyrights (or even cared), everyone used everyone else's flowers. Borrowed, stitched, added to designs, re-sold, all without credit. No one really knew who the first person was to design a flower. Yes, the basic stitches (bullion, cast-on, stem, chain, etc.) are available to all. Stitch 'designs' - combined stitches, changes, variations - those require attribution (a concept in copyright law which requires that the designer or author be credited).

It has since been decided that these early flowers are all public domain designs. There is still discussion about sharing to teach and using floral designs that others have developed as part of their embroidery/teaching businesses. I'll tell you where to find the instructions for these floral designs and those who have the early B.E. books will be able to stitch them for their own personal use.

Here are the floral designs that I used; you'll see that I used the flower (in most cases with original instructions, but sometimes changing what I did), and I added greenery, leaves, stems to make a new design. I won't sell these, but I'm sharing them to give stitchers an idea of what they can do with a flower they like. These designs are approximately 2 1/2" square.

1.  Fuchsia

2.  Maria's Rose

3.  Bossa Nova Rose

4.  Snow Flower

5. Geron (or Gerone)/Lazy Daisy

6.  Bullion Daisy

7.  Peach Blossom

8.  Rolled Rose

9.  Creeping Flower

10. Cast-on Daisy

11. April Flower

12. Ruth's Tole Rose

13. Japanese Violet

14. Canada's Rose (my original design!)

15. Cast-on Flower

16. Maria's Iris

No blue!
The next time I write, I'll share with you some of the things I did when I designed and stitched this little 27" square art quilt.

Rosalie