Jo's Adventures in Quilting: The Well Dressed Man - Project Quilting challenge 8.5

This week the theme for Project Quilting is Well Dressed Man. I was initially stumped. I had only the vaguest of ideas of where I might want to go with it.

In our younger days, my husband's unofficial theme song was ZZ Top's Sharp Dressed Man. And Tom still enjoys the chance to dust off his dinner jacket now and then, like when he went to a movie themed costume party as James Bond. Maybe I could do something with that. But nothing specific came to mind.

As I continued trying to brainstorm, I considered the different types of fabrics and patterns used in menswear, specifically suits, dress shirts and ties. And I started to get a clearer picture of what I might be able to do with pinstripes and paisleys. I was almost ready to run with that idea until Tuesday morning when I was checking out the posts on the Facebook group Challenge Quilts' page where many of us who participate in Project Quilting post the inspiriations for our ideas, pictures of our works in progress and finished projects. Seeing the various takes on the theme from others in the group helped get me past thinking of this challenge only in terms of more formal menswear.

Since I wanted Hubby to be my inspiration, and since he now wears golf attire more often than not, I decided to base my quilt on the well dressed golfer! From there, the rest came pretty easily.

I am not very good at creating a drawing of this type from scratch, so I searched the internet for clip art I could use as a starting point and came across this free pattern meant for stained glass. Eureka! It was perfect. With just a couple of tweaks, I had my applique pattern ready to go.

I originally planned to add stitching to create the plaid and argyle looks I wanted but as I looked through my stash trying to choose fabrics, I noticed the leftovers from my previous challenge entry Night Flight still sitting out on top of a set of drawers near my sewing machine. Wow! Those prints were exactly right.

By Tuesday evening I had all my applique pieces cut out and ready to fuse into place.

On Wednesday I stitched the pieces to the background using my go-to applique stitch, the blanket stitch. I decided to use a dark grey thread for most of the applique stitching because I wanted it to help define the various elements of the design. I'm still not sure if either the stitch or the thread color was the right choice, but I'm not about to try to change it now.

Once all the applique pieces were outlined I added a just a little bit of quilting to finish it off.

Course Couture