Slow days with machine breakdown

Millie stands idle while we wait for tyet another part from APQS. I unloaded the quilt I was working on and Mr Wazoo will be available to help me with the part installatyion if it comes today.
Meanwhile, I kept busy with the sari quilt sewing, and even took a speed trip to the fabric shop for fabrics to go with the bronze and red-purple silk sari fabric. I hope to make some progress on that today.
The blue and light gray one is ready for quilting.

I cut the pieces of fused silk into blocks, and arranged them in a medallion. The center Dresden Plate block uses two solid support fabrics along with bits of the sari for the blades. I hand appliqued this plate into position on a light gray background.

Here, I was experimenting with the printed border of the sari for the quilt border. I knew I wanted to miter the corners, so I just folded it to see how it would look.

Here is a close view with the pieces sewn together. Because the sari is printed a bit wonky, the lines don't look perfectly straight, but they are!

All sewn and with the mitered border!

A sari is a huge piece of fabric, so I was able to piece a backing from this one to match fabric with the front. It will be new territory for me to quilt something silk with a silk back.

I didn't take a photo of the backing after sewing, but the stripes are repeated on either side of the center motifs. Should be interesting.

More rain expected today. Mr W is not happy...hopefully, he will get busy with the Millie if her parts arrive.

Sewing with saris

Because I can't quilt until the machine is fixed, I decided to work on one of my customer commissions. A woman brought me three saris from her mother-in-law who had recently passed away. She wants five quilted projects made from these saris. I had never seen one before, and it will be a new experience for me to do these quilts. Each one of the saris is 43" x 110" of fabric.
Two of the three saris are silk, and one is cotton. One is a beautiful, and obviously dressy silk, with two colors for the warp and weft. This makes the fabric have a shimmer when it moves from the light maroon to gold. One end is heavily embroidered with gold thread, and there is a border of wide gold ribbon along three sides of the fabric. This one will have to be stabilized with interfacing to keep it from raveling. The quilt from this will be the most difficult to make, so I'm leaving it to last!
The second piece will be made into a wall hanging for the granddaughter. It is dark blue patterns on a white background of voile fabric. Extremely lightweight and drapey. I will also be adding stabilizer to this.
The last one is a lightweight silk with purple stylized elephants on a yellow-orange background. I need to make two baby quilts from this for a new set of twin grandbabies. I decided to start here.
I cut a strip from the center of the fabric for experimentation. I pressed it, but it was still to fluid to cut with any precision or sew easily. Spray starch to the back of the fabric made it like thin paper. Worked great! I want these quilts to be soft in the end, so didn't want to use the fusible interfacing if I didn't need to.

This is the stabilized with starch fabric, ready for cutting and sewing.

I used the printed border from the sides of the fabric to make end borders, and left the fabric in a whole piece, rather than doing a lot of piecing. With the drawing expertise  of Mr Wazoo, I made an elephant template and cut two from purple fabric with fusible web on the back. I added the saddle cloth like in the original fabric, and sewed all of this down with Glide thread in a light orange color. Simple but effective!

Both quilts look the same, but the printed cloth on the elephant's back is slightly different so each twin has a unique quilt. I used a tear-away stabilizer for the eye, and it stayed nice and flat. Buttonhole stitch set at 2.6  worked great for the outline.

This is the finished flimsy, still soft (as you can see! It was a challenge to get it to stay on the design wall...) and ready to quilt. I'll get ther second one done today. It ended up 43" x 53".

The weather has been beautiful, so Mr W and I ventured out to our favorite nursery in Hayesville, NC and picked up two new shrubs and a new plant for the planter outside my studio.  He spent the afternoon digging and planting. A nice Father's Day gift!