I'd been busy earlier in the year with a beautiful hand embroidery project, making the centres for this gorgeous quilt, Flowerville. The pattern is by the Australlian designer Rosalie Dekker Designs. I'd bought this as a BOM online from Under The Mulberry Bush in Australia, and each month I'd kept up with the hand embroidered centres (these were stitched with gorgeous Cottage Garden Threads). Anyway, I'd put off making the dresden plates and when the 9th centre was embroidered the whole thing was packed away. My resolution for 2017 was to get my UFO's completed before I started any new projects. So I pulled out these gorgeous Tilda fabrics and started slicing them up...
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...a very handy dresden plate template was included with month 1 of Flowerville. I'd got a nice new blade in my 60mm rotary cutter, and I layered several fabrics on top of one another, so it didn't take too long to get the blades cut - all 324 of them! Once the blades were cut they needed to be stitched across the top to make the point. This involved lots and lots and lots of chain piecing...
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...I'd arranged all the blades in the order in which they'd be stitched together, and this certainly saved a lot of time once the top seam had been stitched. The seam was clipped, finger pressed open, and turned the right way through revealing a nice sharp point at the top of the blade. The blades were stitched in 4 sets of 9, and I found that using a straight stitch needle plate really helps with the precision piecing...
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...once the 4 sets of 9 blades were joined together, I gave the blade a final press, and laid it into position on the background fabric ready to be appliqued into place. As you can see, I decided to follow the same layout that Rosalie Dekker used in her original design, as I don't really do "random" very well! Only 8 more dresden plates to make and I can finally start the applique!
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