The last post about the Antelope Horns wall hanging ended with me sewing the patches to a foundation cloth. Here’s how they looked, compared to the photo, once I finally finished the foundation piecing.
Next step: quilting! I used a regular presser foot, because I can control the stitching better.
Now for my favorite part—embellishing. First, I outlined all the petals with a widely-spaced buttonhole stitch.
Using the photo as a pattern, I crocheted the white “horns” and the violet centers for each little flower. For each horn, I started with a crocheted five water-drop shapes. I laid them on the photo, so I could see how long the five stems needed to be, and to see how to attach them to a crocheted white center.
In the photo below, three of the flowers already have violet centers attached, but one shows the provisional white center. Though you can’t see it in the finished wall hanging, the white center adds dimension to the piece by lifting the violet centers a little higher than the horns.
By laying out the horns on the photo, I could figure out how to finish the end of each horn, by crocheting taller or shorter stitches in the second round of stitching. Some of the horns are seen from the side, so their final row is different from the horns we see straight-on.
I embroidered the purple stripes along the sides of the horns, which partially appliqued the horns in place. The dark violet center had lots of cream and light green embroidery. I sewed fuzzy five-petal flowerets to the centers before appliqueing them over the provisional white centers.
The button phase of any wall hanging is the best part of my favorite phase of embellishment. I poured the buttons from our big jar and gleefully picked out 14 or 15. I arranged them on the wall hanging and….oh. They didn’t look good. Aw, man!
Every button in the leafy section stood out like a sore thumb. I had been able to match the colors well, even matching light swirls in a dark button with the appliqued netting in the background. But they stood proud and a little too shiny. They distracted from the flowers.
In the flower half of the wall hanging, I managed to place four buttons. Their height matches the height of the applique, so they blend in better. After sewing on the buttons, I was…not quite finished. With a little administrative sewing (attaching the hanging sleeve), the wall hanging was done.
Hurray! On to the next project.