Magic Vine

For a long time, I considered making a version of the Magic Vine quilt. I waffled between the blocks offered, free, from Gayle at Sentimental Stitches; and the book of patterns by Eleanor Burns. Finally I purchased the book, and I'm glad I did. She has re-printed all the original newspaper articles that were used to make this quilt, which makes greaet reading; the book also offers great ideas for embellishing with hand embroidery, machine stitches, crystals, and ribbon. There are many quilt layouts in various colour schemes to give lots of ideas on how to make your own Magic Vine.

Here are three blocks I've made - I did them as needleturn, with starch turned edge on the leaf that sticks out of the top, mean to be sewn down as the blocks are joined as vine - quick and easy to sew, and the embellishing is a little bit extra to think about.

I think this looks pretty good - almost a keeper! But, I'm not sure those really are the colours I want to use; and I've now decided to set each block on point instead of in a vine, in a strippy setting. I'm going to shrink them to 6" from 7" and do a 25 block layout, so I should end up with a nice size wall hanging. Well, that's the plan for now.

I went digging through my stash yesterday, and found this odd piece of focus fabric, and then dug up a whole new selection of colours that could make a bright spring version of magic vine -

I think I'll try a few blocks with these colours, and see how it looks.

Note to self - add more busy and/or large print focus fabrics to my stash! It really is a pretty easy way to pick colours, an idea that I rarely make use of.