WIP Wednesday – Turtle Finished, Sea Star Added

There’s been a new addition to my Under the Sea crazy quilt block since I last shared a photo of it.

When I was trying to draw the sea star on the sea bottom I couldn’t get it looking the way I wanted, so our middle daughter drew it for me so that the arms look like it’s crawling over the sand.   Before embroidering it, I checked out photos of sea stars that can be found in Hawaii and then chose a variegated floss in those colors to stitch it with.

When you last saw the Hawaiian green sea turtle, I had only stitched the gold outline.   She is now finished.

If you want to know how I know my sea turtle is a she, it’s because she has a small, skinny tale.  Male sea turtles have long, thick tales.

Here’s a photo of the scene as it stands now:

There are still lots more fun details to be added.  I plan to include a different variety of sea star below and a little to the left of the fire coral.  There will be other varieties of coral as well.  And of course, I’ll need some fish!

This project has become one of my happy projects where I stitch and dream of when we lived in Maui and went scuba diving every chance we could.  I’m even thinking ahead to a much larger Under the Sea scene because I am so enjoying figuring out how to translate the under water world in stitches.

I’ve also made progress on my Forest Friends quilt.

The multi-colored half log cabin blocks have been straight-line quilted in a diamond pattern that I created by drawing two large Vs on each block; one the inverse of the other.   Once they were all drawn on, I was able to quilt and turn, quilt and turn, without having a lot of stops and starts.   This had the added advantage of not having as many threads to bury, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned before is my least favorite part of making a quilt.

Today, I’ll be burying those threads before moving on to free motion quilting leaves in the cream colored sections of the quilt.

To update Dave’s WIP from last week, he’s finished the sanding and has moved on to spray painting each of the chair parts.

The DIY spray paint booth you can see in the background was constructed from parts of a gazebo that we found put out on garbage day.  After they’ve served their purpose as a spray booth, Dave is going to paint those as well and turn them into trellises for our tomato and zucchini that we’ve got growing in pots in the back yard.

What are you working on today?

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