I know it's a little more than 12x12 but I had to add the roots!

I used fabric wrapped cord for the stems and felt for the leaves.

Sandstone - finally

Here is my sandstone piece finally. I was originally going to try to dye fabric with sandstone, kinda like those red dirt shirts, and do a 'shades of sandstone' quilt, but as you can see that didn't workout too well. How do they do that? I wound up with a couple pastel pieces of fabric. I used one of those pieces on the back. Then I thought I would do a sandstone border for a photo I took of some flowers growing in sandstone. The finished piece I have here was to be the border only, but I liked the way it came out, so here it is, no flowers. It is a piece of ultra-suede that I used variegated thread on. It originally had square corners that looked terrible after I tried to miter them with a zig-zag border stitch - works well when you are doing it in the middle of a quilt, not so well on an edge, at least for me. So I cut them off and rounded them, now I can sleep at night. Below are some detail photos. Now if I can only get to 'peace' and 'frog'.

Kasha's Comfort

Finally when I had the Telephone Quilt group over my house for the unveiling luncheon I got my idea for 'Comfort.' (Thank goodness it didn't involve dental floss!) I had recently hung a photo of my daughter, Kasha, in the hallway and walked by it showing the house to everyone. The photo is the one in the middle of the quilt. In the photo she has her favorite 'bankie' wrapped around her head - which she does often. Since she had 5 of these blankies, I cut one up and used it to frame the photo which Lisa C. had printed on fabric for me. I added some decorative stitches and beads to break up all the black space in the background and added a black border to tie it together. Bankie is on the back too. I figured it would be a memento for her. What a pain it was cutting that blankie, a polyester Traget item! I had fuzzy bits everywhere! Shifty too! So now she has 4.5 blankies. I rebound the one I cut up and she doesn't really notice the size difference. When Kasha saw it, she said 'cute!' and likes to lay down on it, point out the flowers and butterflies. She did see her cut up blankie in my suitcase (binding hanging and all) when I was getting ready to go on a quilting retreat, slapped her leg with her hand, tilted her head and said 'bankie, no!'