Keepsake Bunting – Helena Dawn

As I was collecting all of the pictures for this blog post, I realized that I began this project in September of 2016 shortly after Bari J’s Joie De Vivre collection launched. The entire collection is stunning, but the Joyeux Alphabet panel especially made me feel the feels because I knew that I could make a beautiful keepsake for Helena that she’d love forever.

At first, I honestly thought I was going to make Helena a quilt, so I picked a bunch of yellows from the collection, cut out her first name, and got going.

With a year and a half more experience quilting under my belt, I look at this image now and can imagine a bajillion different quilts I could make. However, at the time, that’s not where the journey of this project took me. I’m not much of a planner and generally follow my intuition and instead of immediately diving into yellow, I cut out “Dawn,” which is Helena’s middle name and thenbordered each letter with a print to bring highlight the pinks. After that I was honestly stumped, so I put it all in a box and forgot about it the first time.

Then a few months later, I discovered quilting over Bosal fusible foam, which is amaaaaaazing, and I was drawn immediately back to this project, which changed from a quilt to bunting. I was also going through a phase of quilting with Aurifil 80 wt and the Champagne color was absolutely delicious.

I decided to make to levels for the bunting and needed two additional elements to go with the DAWN, so I cut out one bird and one butterfly.

I basically was in love so I made a video and got stumped again because I couldn’t decide on the binding fabric. Like seriously I think I tested 5 or 6 different bindings and removed each one before I gave up and put it back in the box to hibernate until a couple weeks ago.

[wpvideo fD1q2Llc ]

One day, I randomly remembered that I bought this Alphabet print from Bari J, which I framed, but never hung up on the wall. After finally finding it on a shelf, Helena decided where she wanted it and then I hung it up on the wall.

And then after I hung this up I totally remembered about the bunting-in-progress, so I went on a scavenger hunt and then finally found it. And when I pulled it out of the box, I immediately knew which fabric to bind each rectangle in.

Once I bound all of the rectangles, I was super stoked because I finally got to play with my new grommet set. And since Helena’s obsessed with gold, that’s the color I chose from the set. And I tried to connect the bunting with fabric, but it wasn’t giving it the eleganza of the quilted pieces. So I chose the perfect gold chain to connect everything and bippity boppity boo this keepsake bunting to last for eternity was birthed.

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