I Like My Coffee and Cotton Kona!

The other day I bought some white Kona cotton to finally start on an embroidered quilt.  The embroidered designs will be from Trish Burr's book "Needle Painting Embroidery".  No more wasting the embroidered lesson or turning them into small projects.  The cotton is a medium weight and will take many launderings.  Lee preshrunk the fabric for me and I have copied lesson 10 wild pansy onto a 10 inch square.    The idea was to make embroidered centers with smaller squares surrounding them.  The problem was that the embroidered designs are very diverse in colors.  So how would I find colors for the smaller patchwork squares and have the design look balanced?  I was working on a square when I had what I hope will be a really great idea.  I was feeling guilty because I hadn't finished the yoyo quilt and here I was starting a more traditional patchwork quilt.  So I decided to put them together.  A 6 inch embroidered square padded and with a simple quilting pattern surrounded by purple yoyos!  Here are some of the layout pictures for the quilt.

Yoyo quilt with 6 inch embroidered centers.  This pattern is
Wild Pansy from Needle Painting Embroidery.

Test layout.

There is still a problem with color to work on.  The purple yoyos are great but will they look right surrounding a peach colored rose?  So maybe just embroidering purple flowers would look better.  Another idea would be to make yoyos that match the embroidery colors and do a kind of staggered rainbow.  Whatever colors I decide on I do want to work some green into the yoyos area.  I was thinking of adding green leaves by using the pointed petal tool by Clover.  Just a little reshaping should make it look like a leaf.  I am getting very excited about this quilt.  My estimates are 20 embroidered blocks and 600 yoyos.  Lots of fun or work which ever way you look at it.

This morning I planted some interesting plants we found at KMart.  Orange mint, red geranium and a pink brandwine tomato plant.  We also got a bee balm, greek oregano and fern leaf lavender but I haven't found the right place to put them yet.  The bee balm is a Monarda which is very invasive so it may go into a large pot or planted on the edge of the yard.  The flowers attract butterflies and bees, we have very few of these visiting so hopefully we will see a lot more.

Fern leaf lavender.  It has very tiny flowers.

Greek oregano and bee balm.

The clematis is finally blooming.  So very pretty and longer blooming then I hoped for.

Another clematis flower.

Fuchsia in the shade garden in front.