Dandelion Wishes

When I pondered the theme of "wishes" it reminded me of those days at the end of summer, when the heat was high, the grass was getting dry and crispy, and the sky was cloudless and blue. My friends and I would lay in the sun, pick dandelions that had lost their bloom, and blow on them to release the seeds.

I decided to try to make a quilt using that idea. Not having experimented much with mixed media and three dimensional items in a quilt, I thought I'd play a bit. My husband is the tea drinker in the family, so I decided to recycle some used tea bags. I let them dry out, then opened them and tossed the tea.

Once the tea papers were fully dry, I fan-folded them and tied them with string, making two large and two tiny pom-poms. Remember how we used to do that? It was easy to do, thanks to Wonder clips that held the fan-folded paper for me while I tied the string. I forgot to take pictures though!

Next up, was to make that clear blue sky and green grass. I did some improv work with some green scraps for the grass.

Then I attached a bright blue Moda Grunge to the green improv for the sky and added some wavy quilting to create some gentle breezes. Next up, a new thing for me - a little bit of thread painting. For someone who doesn't really free motion, I was a bit nervous, but I just had fun with it. What's to lose, right? I added two stems and two smaller ones.

Now it was time to add the dandelions. I did this by leaving long thread tails to the blossoms, then pulling each thread through to the back of the finished quilt and tying it off.

My dandelions look a bit like peonies, do they not? I even tried snipping them to create a more stringy look to the blossom, but couldn't quite get the effect. The little puffs above are the seeds that have been blown off one of the blossoms.

All in all, it was a fun experiment.

This little quilt measures approximately 15" x 18" and was made using scraps from my stash.

There are a few things I wish I would have done differently, but isn't that a bit what wishes are made of?

Thanks for the fun challenge!

Wendy