Harry Potter Project of Doom "Quilt-Behind": Week 18

I haven't been able to do a lot of embroidery the last couple of days, because we are slowly recovering and backing up 1.3 MILLION files from my dead hard drive, leaving the laptop pretty well occupied and covered in wires.  It has been an expensive and lengthy process, but the good news is that all my family photos have been recovered, as well as all my patterns I had developed but not yet tested.  That makes for one happy mom and designer.  :)

Even so, I wanted to get a little something done today, so I finished up half of what will be my block 18.  I actually took the peacock quill and ink bottle from the block 15 pattern, but I have other big plans for block 15, and I wanted the peacock quill somewhere.

Peacock quill and magical ink.

Finding this peacock quill fabric was a total fluke.  I happened to be walking past it at JoAnn, and I thought I remembered a quill in one of the patterns.  Even though I would probably never pick this fabric for anything else ever, it really spoke to me for this particular block.

Close-up of peacock fabric.  It's a little psychedelic.

I went for somewhat plain greens and purples for the rest of the feather.  I'm fairly happy with how it turned out.

Our magical ink.

My daughter and I had a hard time deciding on ink bottle fabrics.  She wanted it to be rainbow ink, but the one fabric I had was going to detract from the quill fabric.  We went through my TARDIS cookie jar scrap stash and she found this black with stars and swirls.  We figured that looked like pretty magical ink and would show up well against the natural background.  We went with grey on top because a clear or light color wouldn't show up too well.  I think it looks like the ink is dripping back down into the bottle this way.  I'm not really happy with how it lined up on the left, but it was more important to me that the quill point lined up perfectly, so I think this is good enough.  I'm actually considering appliqueing some drops of ink coming down the side of the bottle later to cover that.

To finish this block, I am actually going to include the potion bottle book variation from block 18.  I got some small potion labels free from Spoonflower when they had a free swatch promotion, and it had tons of little potion labels on it.  I'm going to applique one of those on the book for fun.

Mostly invisible Invisible Book of Invisibility.

I worked on one other fun project today: my Invisible Book of Invisibility.  To make this one, I used clear, monofilament embroidery thread and the alphabet function on the embroidery machine.  I embroidered the book name directly on to my background fabric.

Look what a little monofilament thread can do!

To make it stand out more, this one is going to go under the horizontal stack of books on the Snitch block.  Hopefully it will make it look like the books on top of it are floating, drawing your eye to the empty space and title.

I am also super stoked about some fabric that showed up in the mail today:

Mermaid stained glass fabrics.  These really inspired me when I saw them!

These are slotted for my seventh(!) row on my bookshelf, where I will include the mermaid stained glass designed by Michelle Thompson.  It's available on the Fandom in Stitches Harry Potter page.  The fabric on the right will be the background, and I'm going to add an extra border of the fish fabric.  I have plenty of this, so I will be adding some of this to my book spine/magical item fabric giveaway.

Speaking of which, you can still enter the giveaway!  I've extended it by a week and will draw a winner on Monday.  Just leave me a comment letting me know that you would like some fabric for your PoD ... or any other project you might be working on.  :)  I have two entrants right now, and if I don't receive any more, I will add a bunch of fabric and split the pile between you two lovely ladies!