Another banner update

I'm obsessed with this project. I think about it night and day. For the past week our kitchen island has been littered with fabric, stencils, iron-on interfacing, "Heat'n'Bond," scissors of various sizes, glue, freezer paper, pencils, pins, and other extraneous materials.

I've made a second, emergency run to Marden's for more fabric.

And of course, I've neglected the housework, which is always easy.

I think this will be the final design, which is drastically different from the original design. At the top is the A∆K logo, which needs to be included somewhere in the piece. Scattered about the logo and elsewhere are violets, the official flower of A∆K.

In the middle of the night I awoke suddenly with the solution to cutting out the "Maine" letters: first iron a piece of interfacing to the back of the plain navy fabric, use the erasable pen to trace the letters backwards onto the interfacing, cut them out, then apply some Heat'n'Bond to the back of the letters to secure them to the middle strip of fabric before machine appliquéing them in place. I was assuming the middle strip should be white, then I thought perhaps blue would be better, but Ken says white works better. I'm still not sure which it should be.

The machine appliqué of Portland Head Light was surprisingly easy. I followed Linda's advice and did a test appliqué with scrap fabric, to get the feel of the process and the machine, before tackling the actual Head Light appliqué. (That was a good suggestion, Linda.) And Heat'n'Bond is my new very best friend. It makes appliqué a breeze, with absolutely no puckering of the fabric as you guide it under the presser foot.

I still have to sew the three sections together (after appliquéing the violets and "Maine" in place), then I'll add three narrow border strips around all four sides...and the hard part will be behind me.

I'm finding, though, that the closer I get to completing the banner, the more frightened I grow that my A∆K sisters won't like it.

But I guess if they don't like it, then they can step forward and take on the task of making a newer, better state banner, can't they?!