Cloud Club Final Layout...

I've always said that the most joy I get out of this little business is seeing what YOU make from the designs! And every so often, you send me wonderful pictures. This arrived in my inbox yesterday, completely out of the blue-- and I have to tell you, I was in such rhapsody there was no living me for the rest of the day!

This is a finished Cloud Club quilt made by Sarah from Michigan!

Well, not just a quilt but pillows and wallhangings, too!

I honestly have no words for this, because it is completely beyond anything that I, myself, was going to make.

Truthfully, I never saw these designs as something you would put on a bed, but Sarah hit it right out of the park. Look how perfectly the original set of birds sits on top of the bed-- then a perfectly colored friendship braid meets the dropover (I would never have thought of that). Finally she uses multiple hoopings of the feather blocks for the overhang and a pillow tuck. It's just unbelievably lovely and I hope she enters it in a show!

Sarah, you made my day!

Not only that, but I'm seriously inspired to now finish up my own quilt-- I think it would be a lot less work!

After the first year of the Cloud Club, this is where we stood:

No one enjoys a square design more than me, but something was feeling not right about it-- that, and everyone was really enjoying the birds. So I planned another layout that added two more rows and need five more birds-- that was Series Two. I've been promising a new layout for awhile now-- well, what am I waiting for, now that we're all stuck home?

And to answer that question--LOL-- what I personally am waiting for is all of my birds to get finished! You might find that surprising, but at least four of mine need to be redone for various reasons-- forgot to put the same color of quilting thread in the bobbin--backing fabric corner flipped in and got stitched into the design-- yes, these things happen to the best of us! Here is where my blocks reside for now.

I have to admit it hurts me sometimes when I think that instead of a finished and gorgeous quilt, there's just a box of odds and ends!

If anything ever happened to me, 

no one would ever know how to finish it!

And at the risk of sounding like a pompous idiot-- these birds are all so heartbreakingly beautiful.

Most of all I have to thank Sarah for a push-- the Cloud Club birds are out of the box and it's time for them to fly!

My original idea was to layout the birds in seasonal order-- starting with January, and ending with Christmas. So I printed out a sheet with all of them on it, so I could easily shuffle them around to add the five new birds as the seasons pass.

The mockingbird has cherry blossoms-- that's early spring, so I put that after the robin. The meadowlark and wood duck were more of a summer scene. Woody the woodpecker had fall leaves-- and finally the cedar waxwings were full on winter. 

Here they are laid out like the quilt would be:

So then, of course, there's the fine tuning-- I'd rather have two of my favorites in the middle. That's the mockingbird-- the sewing machine is SEW ME! and the California Quail because, well, you know. So those were moved into the middle slots, then I split up the oriole and the hummingbird which both had a lot of orange and a little tweaking with yellow. Usually I like to have things facing into the middle, but since the blue jay and robin both face out-- it has a nice balance and really doesn't bother me. 

FINAL CLOUD CLUB LAYOUT

So there it is!  Sorry the image quality is not the best-- it's a gray one here today-- but if you right click on the photo and select SAVE IMAGE AS, you can save it to you computer and print a big one out on 8-1/2" x 11" paper for reference. There's no "right" layout-- so pick the ones the are most meaningful to you for the middle-- and you're under no obligation to go by the seasons as I so love to do.

So, there's no time like the present for "production sewing" as I call it-- I need four corners and ten feathered side triangles-- that is really not too many compared with Sarah's version. I hope you feel inspired to bring this project out of your closet and wrap it up-- you can take 25% off any of the birds or finishing kits with the coupon code keepcalmstitchon through the end of April.

What are you waiting for?

A Christmas Cloud Club quilt is 

definitely in my mind after this one!

xox

Carol