Little Red Riding Hood

Warning: This quilt is seriously cute.

No, ridiculously cute. And no, I did not do all of this insanely gorgeous applique either. It came to me from a new customer. One that is just getting into applique. I'd say that this is the best hand applique I have seen. I myself have been appliquing for years and am not this good! No sitch is visible. There is no bulk. And it's not cheater fusible applique - the real McCoy. Like I said, pretty amazing. Almost to the point of making me fearful to be her quilter! I think and hope she'll be happy with the product I send back to her.
But it was a total blast. A creative vent of epic proportion. That is, when I was not very carefully and slowly ditch outlining EVERY stinking applique! Holy cow, or Holy big bad wolf, there were a lot of appliques to go around. Thankfully, they all had a similar color background so I didn't do that much thread color changing until I got to the really detailed outlining of things like cats and wolves and button fllower centers.

This post is picture heavy, but they are SO adorable.

I was intending to do this heart & feather plume on all 4 borders but it was really hard to see on the top border so I vowed to do it only twice (or risk fouling it up royally!). The quilting always shows more once it's untensioned.

My goal was for a sampling of background fills. I hope that the owner appreciates the whimsy. She sent me a picture of the finished quilt (presumably by the designer), but in my opinion, the quilting of the background is sparse. And a tad boring. Too much stippling makes me nauseaus. The only area I stippled was around the wolf in gramma's bed (below). I wanted the stippling to help make the pillow pop off of the quilt. It did just that. The pillow is downright fluffy!

This is one of my favorite blocks too. I like the hidden heart inside of the wreath. And the swirling fill - I have seen this done but had never tried it myself. It is a bit tedius, but OK for smaller spaces. I'd never do this on a large quilt.

This cat and mice is absolutely incredible. I should have stuck a ruler in the picture. Each mouse is only about .75" long. Not so amazingly, I decided not to ditch outline each of these rodents. I am most partial to big yellow cats, so he's pretty sweet in my book!

Little Red Riding Hood is at the quilt's center. Her face is so incredibly stitched so do take a double click and look. The eyes and the pupils are all fabric.

More teeny-tiny stuff to stitch around. All I can say is thank goodness for multi-color sets of sharpie pens to dot out those errant white stitches! How she appliqued those tiny tendrils, which are not 0.25" wide is beyond me.