Grapes of wrath...

Smucker's and Welch's...eat your heart out!  I've been making grape jelly!  I'm working on my doodled outer border for my Folk Art Applique quilt and was hoping that a grapevine theme would be just the thing the quilt needed.

I've prepping grapes:

• while posting about fabric and scraps, I've been prepping grapes
• while coming clean about my UFOs, I've been prepping grapes
• while looking through my butchered magazine pattern files, I've been prepping grapes
• while waiting on the laundry, I've been prepping grapes
• while dinner was baking, I've been prepping grapes

Well, you get the idea.  Gluing 400 tiny circles is a little like screwing 400 caps on 400 tubes of toothpaste...a little boring.  I would be ready for a padded room if they had all been made from the same fabric!  I've been dealing with some anger...sitting quietly and doing some focused, disciplined, repetitive glue work is a good thing right now...I'm not dangerous with a gloppy glue stick in my hand.  A rotary cutter, on the other hand...grapes of wrath, indeed!  Acceptance at the end of a glue stick rather than at the bottom of a chocolate wrapper...a much better idea!

After deciding I needed 14 clusters of grapes for the 4 borders, I set out to distribute the grapes so that the clusters would look random...varying both the fabric make up of each cluster and distributing the sizes.

Since I'm not sure how wide either the blue scallop inner border or final grapevine border will be, I ripped wide borders that can be trimmed down once the hand appliqued borders are sewn down and soaked to remove the glue.

I marked a center chalk line along the length of the border strips, then found the center.  After bending my French curve into a pleasing, undulating ripple, I prepped some vines and glue basted the first on in place.  Then it was time to start arranging the grapes into clusters...that's the fun part.

Oh, me likey!  Last time I made a grapevine (in my Civil War Bride quilt), I was working on a neutral background.  I love the way the purple grapes look against the black Moda Bella solid...not crazy about how the cat hair looks on there, though.

I should have looked at those older pictures first...the bride grape clusters are less dense (less grapes per cluster)...maybe I could have prepped less than 400 little grapes!  It's funny how a lot of the fabrics are the same from both projects.

I don't think I varied the grape size on the older project, either.  Maybe I should have done the clusters more like the bride block...since this is a folk art sort of style, I don't want the outer border detail to scream "Baltimore" instead of "folk art."  I want the overall feel to be more chunky, kind of like the block style.  Oh well, I'm not about to go back and change it now...I did simplify the leaf shape to appear more folky.

The grapes are fun to stitch down, and because of the fine quality of the YLI silk thread, I can use the same dark, medium brown to stitch them all.  I am using a lighter neutral silk thread on the green vines and leaves.

I completely stitched down this first side border before going on the prep the other three.  I wanted to make sure I liked how things were turning out first.

I really like the way the purples look next to the blue scallop border...they will be closer still once I trim to final size on both borders. 

Next I prepped the sort-of-mirror-image opposite border.  Even though the vine is about the same, I wasn't really fussy about every grape being a mirror image of the opposite clusters.

Time for more stitching!

Now if I can just keep Weasley (a.k.a. Mr. Sticky Paws) from walking across the remaining 6 clusters of grapes awaiting arrangement on the top and bottom borders, perhaps my remaining grapevines won't look "post-harvest."  He paces...making a circuit on the tabletop, then I find a trail of scattered tiny purple grapes in his wake...arrrrrgh (I even found one in the litter box...he can keep that one).

Maybe I will go ahead and soak this first stitched grapevine border, then trim everything so I can stop being nervous about the proportions (and the trimming!).  I do like how it is looking, though.  Off to plunge border #1 in some water...

In stitches,
Teresa  :o)