Capital Swap

My Modern Quilt Guild decided to swap with the Washington DC Modern Guild as the two national capitals. My partner was #sewtogetherphyliss and she wanted something with cherry blossoms. (The ideas was to make something about that person's capital city, not about our own, a little confusing)

I decided (on my third go around) to try trapunto for the first time... I chose to do the letters reading Washington in a subway sort of style. I printed the letters off, copied them to freezer paper, ironed that to my fabric and then outlined with my Frixion pen.

Then I added two layers of wool batting and sewed the letter outlines with a 1.5 reduced stitch.

After that I carefully cut away all the excess batting leaving only the letter outlines.

As I am sure you can imagine, this was not the quickest mini I have ever done LOL! Then I added another layer of wool batting, machine appliqued my branches on, hand appliqued three different sizes of cherry blossoms and hand embroidered the stamens.

And finally the finished quilt! It ended up at about 20" x 20".

The only thing that bothered me was that I wasn't able to "pop" the perle cotton stamen knots through the back fabric so there are little clusters of dark brown knots on the back, If anyone knows of a secret let me know for next time :)

*edit* I forgot to add that this is one of my goals for the 2016 first quarter finish-a-long! Although I did change some details midway.