Blushing giraffe

I mentioned this fabric earlier. When I first came across it, it said 'giraffe' to me, and the pink areas suggested that he was blushing. I had a vision of a cute cartoon-like appliqué, but couldn't quite make it happen. When I found a giraffe stencil, a different idea was born.

I used a brown Paintstick to transfer the image to the fabric, added some squares of an African-look Kaffe Fasset fabric along one side and started quilting. And then I was stuck. It just seemed too boring.

Lily suggested that the poor giraffe was hiding in the greenery. And that was just the kind of prompt I needed. A bit of research (or googling) later, and I knew a lot more about giraffes and their life on the savannas of Africa among the acacia-trees. Did you know that giraffes go in for a lot of necking? Really! Maybe that's where the expression comes from ? If you want to know more about these fascinating creatures, this is a good place to begin. Anyway, having read about thos acacias and looked up pictures of their leaves, I was ready to move on. I added some Steam-a-Seam Lite to a piece of green bali and started cutting leaves. One movie later and I was ready to go back to the sewing machine and apply branches and stitch the leaves down. The silhouette of the giraffe didn't stand out as much as I wanted, so I added seed stitches around it, some longer stitches further out, and ended with crosstitch (or kisses) before the hand-stitching merged into the machine quilted hearts.

So there you have it. My Mini Quilt for Monday ended up as a close up of the neck of a love-sick giraffe, lurching among the bushes with a sweet giraffe girl on his mind. Or something like that...