Under the Sea Crazy Quilt

I spent a good deal of time last week preparing an Underwater-themed block for a Round Robin.  I thought I had signed up for the RR, but when the group list came out yesterday, I was not on it.  I have since discovered that instead of hitting "Send", I hit "Save", and my sign-up email was sitting in the Drafts file.......oops. So, since the block is started, and I shouldn't really be taking on another RR right now anyway, I am going to "stitch along" on my own, and sell this as "art to frame" in my Etsy shop.  

 Here you see the basic form of the block - sand, sea, sky, land and sun.  There are still some gaps to be filled at this point.

 Here, the ocean part is pieced, and tucked under the sand area and machine stitched in place.

 Here, the ocean meets the sky - the horizon has to be a straight line so it looks realistic.

 This shows all the sections stitched down, and wow, does it need ironing!  It's lying on a puffy chair pillow here, so the lines look curvy in the picture, but they are straight.  Once this is trimmed, it will be about 1/4 land and sky, 1/2 ocean and 1/4 sand.

I like the detached fern stitch around the edge of the sun - it looks like sunbeams.

When designing this block, I knew I wanted to include a treasure chest on the ocean floor.  I wasn't sure how to go about this, since drawing is NOT one of my strong points.  Here's my solution:  I went to my local thrift store and got this:

 I paid a whole 25 cents for this book!  Illustrated children's books and coloring books are an excellent design source.  The shapes are simple and basic, easy to trace.   A few of the pictures which I may use as a springboard:

There are a couple of treasure chests there, and I may have to add a grumpy octopus to my block as well!

The studio clean up still drags on.  I have 10 boxes and bins of various sizes ready to be moved to the storage shed.  I think there are a couple more boxes' worth of things in the closet that need to be boxed up temporarily, then I can post pictures and call this project finished at last.

Have a great Monday and happy stitching!