Finished March Wallhangings

Yay for more finishes!

This last week has been kind of busy with work (both jobs!), but I still managed to finish my "regular size" March wall hanging for at home and my "mini" wall hanging for at work.

I posted on Instagram when I got  all of the satin stitching done on last Thursday (snow day!) and then did the quilting and binding on Sunday. This was the first time that I used a single color for all of my satin stitching for one of these wall hangings and I am very happy with how it turned out. It definitely helps the birds, tree, and flowers jump out from the busy background. I did vary the width of the satin stitching in a few places because of how small some of the pieces were.

Here's a close up of the birdhouse and I think this picture shows both the different widths of the satin stitching that I did and shows off the quilting. For the quilting I did an all-over pattern that started with a swirl and then I did two layers of flower petals around each swirl. I think it turned out very well and it wasn't too dense or too open.

I think the little red birds might need some button eyes.

Here's a close up of another one of the flowers and more of the quilting showing up well. I used a purple and yellow on creamy-white floral print for the binding to try to bring out some of the non-green/teal colors in the wall hanging. I used this old spool of purple variegated thread (unfortunately you can't really tell it is variegated in these pictures!) to do the top stitching on the front of the wall hanging using this herringbone-type decorative stitch.

On the back I used the same green fabric for the back and the pockets. The fabric is one that I've had in my stash for a long while that I bought when Park Ranger Husband and I were visiting Ohio and I bought the end of this bolt. It's a very cute fabric but for a quilt shop fabric it's kind of on the flimsy side, hence why it's on the back of a wall hanging.

Here's a shot of the quilting on the back and a closer up view of the backing fabric.

And now onto my March mini! Forgive the semi-atrocious fluorescent lighting, I have no windows.

I used all teal pieces for the backing on this one with lights in the middle and darker pieces around the outside (like basically all of these!) and I just put a bird and a birdhouse on it. I thought about doing a flower too, but I was worried it would look too busy.

For the quilting, I used the "gridlines" created by the squares to use as a guide to do a simple clamshell quilting motif. If you look closely, you can see that the "dips" of one row line up with the seams, and the "dips" of the next row line up with the center of the block -- at least for the most part. it was a little harder to stay consistent in the middle where the birdhouse was, but I did my best to keep things evenly spaced and of the same approximate height. All in all -- a good new motif added to my arsenal. Not something I would do on something very large, but a fun accent motif, I think.

Here's the back -- yes, I do hang it up with a pencil.

This squiggly fabric is left over from my Beau's Ties quilt and I have a LOT Of it left over, so I'm probably going to be using it for a lot of wall hanging backings in the near future. I also bound this one with the same fabric -- the squiggle looks so good as a binding!

I'm linking up at the usual places -- free motion mavericks and finish it up friday!