Are you sick of UFO's yet?

I had this silk organza piece hanging around in my UFO pile.  I liked it but I wasn't sure how to continue (imagine it without the flax stalks and the Tui).  The reason was, I had pinned all the organza strips down and started to sew them down, but it was a royal PITA with all those loose edges!

So my solution was to fuse two fabric flax stalks over it and slide a few more bits of fusible web under the loose side edges.  That got rid of the pins and made it much easier to handle.  Then I took a bit of silk organza and ironed a freezer paper mask to it.  You can see that above, on the bench.

I then painted the silk organza with watered down fabric paints and heat set it once it was dry.  I was vaguely trying to follow the colours of the background, but if you look closely you can see that I flipped it eventually - one of the clever things about using organza.

This time the freezer paper is used as a stencil - see I get to use both the positive and negative cuts of the freezer paper - frugal, no?!

I stamped on the background using fabric paint and one of my own hand carved stamps.

Later I decided to stencil another Tui onto the foreground organza.  You can see the two separate layers in the picture and then...

This is how they looks once they are layered.  Still needs a bit of cropping.  I moved the appliqué Tui to the foreground as I decided I didn't like it behind the organza.  When I quilt it, I plan to quilt the outline of another flax stalk and another Tui as I like odd numbers of things.  

So big progress on that UFO!  I'm thinking I can now change it back to being a WIP...?

I've chucked another couple of oddities in the bin (like my unspeakable attempt at trapunto, ugh) and I've another few things on my radar - including the Oscar* quilt.  

*Oscar is what I'm calling Suz's UFO that she tried to chuck away and I rescued it from the rubbish bin - I'll show it soon, promise!!

And here is one for the finished pile.  A friend's elderly grandmother can no longer see well enough to stitch and all this project needed was a binding.  I sewed it on for her along with some hanging corners and now she can enjoy it on her wall.