Jungle Magnolia Month 4 Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well and had a great Fourth of July! 

I was determined to have this month's part of the Jungle Magnolia BOM designed by Judy Niemeyer finished for this blog post so I had some marathon sewing sessions this week. It was tiring, but I achieved my goal! There were four units included in this month's section.

Jungle Magnolia - Finished C1 Units

Jungle Magnolia - Finished C2 Units

Jungle Magnolia - Finished C3 Units

Jungle Magnolia - Finished C4 Units

As I mentioned last week, this month had the first applique of the project. The circles on the flowers and the veins on the leaves are all applique. The pattern includes laser cut stabilizer pieces for the applique. I liked the stabilizer because it is stiff enough to keep good edges when you are folding your fabric over the edge to prepare the applique. It is supposed to break down when the quilt is washed to leave the applique soft in the final quilt. I'll know better about that once finish the piecing and quilting, which will be some time down the road! But I decided that I wanted to get more of this stabilizer for my own use, but I had trouble figuring out which stabilizer it was. I ended up ordering Bosal Stitch-n-Peel. I'll see if it's the right stuff when it arrives. The other new technique for this month was sewing an s-curve. An s-curve has a concave curve that transitions into a convex curve. To sew it, you sew each section separately. You can see the s-curve in the C3 unit on the left in this picture:

Jungle Magnolia - C3/C4 Units

This curve was a bit of a pain to sew. The bottom portion was easy because of the gentle curve, but the top portion is fairly tight so more difficult to sew. They had us sew the bottom portion of the curve first. I feel like that's the easiest way even though I didn't try the other way to make sure. The top of the curve was so tight that I had to fold the piece over on itself just to glue the seam. 

Jungle Magnolia - Glued Seam

It was hard to get a picture to demonstrate this, but this at least shows it a bit. This picture is actually after gluing and then flipping the direction of the curl since you glue it with the fabric on top, but sew it with the paper on top. Then you have to get the piece under the foot of the sewing machine and keep the fabric curved around to keep things flat under the foot while sewing it together and keeping everything flat. My first try, I got a long pleat where the fabric folded over itself a small amount for about an inch (sorry, I forgot to get a picture). So I learned to pull on hte fabric on the bottom while peering around the side of the piece to see the paper under the foot with the bulk of the piece folded over on top of the sewing area. Awkward, but I didn't have any problems with the rest of the seams! I got everything sewed together and here is my current progress:

Jungle Magnolia - Current Progress

This is just 1/4 of the quilt since I don't have enough space to display the entire thing. Just two more months and I'll have a finished quilt top!

I spent most of my time on BOM, but I did take a few small breaks to work on other stuff. I made some progress on my Kalme Throw designed by DeBrosse.

Kalme Throw

I also finished the stitching for the first butterfly in my Flying Beauties cross stitch:

Flying Beauties

Well, that's it for this week.

Nancy