Riddle

What do tea leaves, teapots, candies and edging have in common?   Tat Days, of course!  And Tat Days is only 24 days away!  This year's theme is "Tatting, Tea and Toffee"  making the connection to the riddle easier to recognize!  This year The Thread Bears took on the task of creating a quilted wall hanging to be auctioned off at the conference.  Proceeds from the auction will go to the scholarship fund to help subsidize participants in need attend the conference in the future.

We started with a quilt blank handed to us at last year's gathering.  The theme was easy enough, but bringing it all together would be more challenging.  A Martha Ess teapot from her pattern book "Tea is for Tatting" was a necessary part of the design certainly.  We chose her Shamrock Teapot  from page 30 as our central piece.
 

Not wanting to cover the entire 24 - inch white square with tatting, we looked to a fabric motif that meet the theme and also cover part of the area.  It was just before Christmas, and the fabric store was filled with festive apron panels.  One such apron panel contained a border of cups.  They appeared to hold steaming hot liquids with piles of whipped topping. 
It seemed to be a perfect addition to the quilt.

As a group we created 2 of Martha's Tiny Square Teapots from page 13.  These were tatted in colors that complimented the other colors around the quilt.That left finding a way to pull it all together.  With a bright white center and a brown-and-cream border, finding a way to blend in the reds and greens required a delicate eye.  Green rickrack in the proper color was impossible to find.  But cream rickrack was available in every fabric store.  And that was the perfect transition from the border to the center.  Jill labored over finding the right edging to make the border festive.  Her yardage of a simple edging in Cranberry Bush that tied the greens and reds of the border with the bright white and dark tan of the quilt blank.  The corners look like this:  

  From here we only needed to fill in the spaces with tealeaves and candy.  Thank you Patty Markley for the wonderful leaf pattern you taught at Shuttlebirds Conference back in April.  We had used it as an example of block tatting as well as an all-chains pattern in one of our teaching sessions.  So we had some excellent tea leaves to use.  We added some of the Mary Fitch leaves made from simple rings to set off the more solid leaves and ended with some corner embellishments that showed off our rings-only and chains-only efforts.  These were accompanies by the candies in both cinnamon and toffee renditions created from the pattern I'll be teaching at Tat Days this year.

With these in place, we finished off with a set of 3 teabags created using a block tatting technique with sugar crystals on the edges.  Then to make it all complete we embellished the cups on the border with bits of tatted bling.  

As a group we are very excited about the project and are looking forward to helping create another donation project next year.