Tuesday, August 6, 2013

El Coqui!

In Puerto Rico there is a small frog with a huge sound.  Found only in PR, the coqui, mates by finding another coqui with the perfect pitch.  The male goes 'co' and the female responds 'qui', but it sounds like one frog making one contiguous sound

My husband has a cousin, who along with his wife live in Trujillo Alto, PR.  Their backyard, or outdoor living space is a wonderful, live in garden, that is a natural continuation of their indoor entertaining space.  At night you can hear what seems like millions of coqui's chatting away in the garden.  They sound almost musical.

Well this cousin and his wife are wonderful hosts.  Whenever we are in PR, they take such good care of us, that I wanted to bring them something special when we went down last month.  Last year as I worked on my Jungle Paradise quilt featuring the parrott I would frequently post progress on Facebook and she fell in love with the quilt.  While they were in NY for the Thanksgiving holiday, she saw it in person and she made my heart sing with her praise of my work.  So, I decided to make them a nature scene featuring the coqui.  I thread painted a coqui and created a natural garden scene incorporating some of the plants from her garden that I had taken pictures of on our last visit, along with some other nature inspired greens.  I printed the plants on fabric and along with the coqui, I appliqued them into the garden scene.

I added butterflies in both an applique and 3D effect, as well as ladybugs.


As always, all of my quilting is done free motion and I used a wide variety of threads...  Aurifil 50 wt Cotton; Superior SewFine! and Nature Colors; Metler Twists (to be honest I have used this thread in yrs, but I only needed a little) and some Sulky.  As I have mentioned before, I have 2 favorite brands of thread.....Aurifil for the perfect lint free cotton and Superior for their non-cotton specialty threads,...... but sometimes, you need to pull out something that is hidden in your stash, for either the right color or the right texture.  It is called finding the right tool for the job :-).

This was the first time I tried doing circles in an inner border, where they all had to be the same size.  Remember, I don't mark my quilt tops.  I love the end result, but I must say, it took a while to get the swing of it :-).  There was a lot of 'frogging' going on in that border...  LOL!



This is the end result.



As you can see it looks like she loved it!  And, she immediately recognized the plants from her garden on the bottom right and left hand corners of the wallhanging.  She has told me it will hang over her TV in the family room, so she will look at it everyday!

Here's to family and El Coqui!

Cheers!

2 comments:

Betsy said...

Renee me encanta. .? Es tu patron? Me encantaria hacer UNO para mi salon de clase.

Renee said...

Fiesta... Gracias por las amables palabras. Es un diseño original, pero no es un patrón. Tiendo a crear como voy para mi familia y amigos. (hope my Spanish is ok.)

Dónde están ubicados? Tiene una tienda de acolchar en Puerto Rico?