Table Scraps Challenge - April 2022

I missed the March Table Scraps Challenge.  Among other things, I was trying to get over a GI flare (which is probably TMI already) and needed to make a concentrated effort to get a handle on my diet.  I think I finally figured out that tomatoes and peppers are an issue for me, so I stopped eating them.  Things improved, and I'm grateful for that, but I won't lie what a bummer it is to give up ketchup and chili and pasta sauce and tacos and enchiladas, and the list goes on.  I decided to cut out sugar too, because I know too much of it does my digestive system no good, and I'd gotten into a habit of baking treats a little too regularly.  So all of that took up some mental and physical bandwidth, and blogging fell by the wayside.

But I've adjusted now to the new normal, and hey, it's spring!  Or so they say, because it's been a long, cool one here in the Upper Midwest.  I can't wait for warmer weather and flowers (any day now, Mother Nature?).  So in addition to the Table Scraps Challenge brief of "pink" and "words" for the month of April, I added my own challenge to create something with flowers.

I was thinking I'd make some kind of tulip block into a little table mat, but nothing really inspired me yesterday when I sat down to the task in the sewing room.  I switched to sorting through my pink scraps instead when, lo and behold, a tiny square of fabric sifted through my fingertips.  Hello inspiration!

I decided to applique an improvisational string-pieced flower on a string-pieced background of pink.  For the flower, I pulled all the wordy fabrics I could find, which was not many, but I sewed up a big enough slab to cut out not one but two flowers.

A little bit of jumbo rickrack and some kind of stabilizer strip from the box of trim became other parts of the flowers.  Finally, they seemed to need some kind of foliage, so I pulled out a black and white polka dot scrap and freehand cut a couple of leaves.  Everything got fused down and edge-stitched.

I went with a wavy stitch pattern on my machine for the quilting.  I didn't consciously plan for it to mirror the curves of the rickrack, but it kind of turned out that way.  Serendipity!

I found a black 2-inch strip of fabric with what I think is Japanese lettering on it (but I could be wrong), which sufficed for the binding.  

And there you have it!  It's about 12 inches square and will probably go on my nightstand.

Linking to the April 2022 Table Scraps Challenge at The Joyful Quilter.

~Paulette