I'm taking part in an exchange hosted by Pat Winters which involves embellishing 4 puzzle pieces of the same shape. They're due by June 1st but several have already submitted theirs. You can see them at Pieces of Friendship blog.

This isn't what I was going to do at all. A few months ago I was all fired up and traced the puzzle shapes on some white fabric, also copying "top" on the first one before I realized I would have to cover it up since I can't erase it. LOL! My plan was to embellish with tatting and perhaps a bit of embroidery. I've not done the beautiful stitching on crazy quilting before and don't feel skilled enough to offer it but now that I have this one piece of fabric that I have to cover up, I decided to at least piece a few strips of fabric and see where it took me.

Lesson #1 - plan ahead. Fortunately I'm just playing with this piece but very quickly I learned you better know where you want to lay that fabric and how the overall arrangement should look before you stitch. I didn't even know if I had any other fabrics to complement the original I stitched down and was scrambling to try to find something even close in color.

Lesson #2 - plan ahead. LOL! So in trying to figure out what kind of tatting would fit on something this size and make a statement without detracting from anything else, I could tell I needed to play with some thread and motifs to see what will work and what won't. This little bird from Tatting Collage is perfect but it's in size 80 thread. I hadn't planned on doing a lot of tatting in size 80 but I think over size 30 is going to be too big for the size of the puzzle piece which is basically 4" square.

Lesson #3 - go back to lesson #1. What about those edges? How do I define the shape and hold the fabric layers together? The blanket stitch or a satin overcast stitch is recommended for finishing the edges but what am I doing before I get to the finish part? I traced the puzzle outline on the back and then zigzaged along that, trying to stay on the outer part of it so I can cut just inside or along the edge when I got to finish. I'm not sure yet how this will work out. I think now that I should have just hand basted the shape and cut outside of that until I was ready to finish. Frankly, I wasn't thinking about this very much - I just jumped in so that I would be started. Once I start something, I feel compelled to continue until I finish.

So...that's where I'm at on that!