On Friday I showed some in-progress shots of the design and piecing for my swap quilt, today I thought I'd show a few pictures of the leaf process and the quilting. To make the leaves, I put fusible on the backs of several different squares of yellow-orange-brown fabric then used a scalloped rotary cutter to randomly slice up the squares. My mom saw that tip on The Quilt Show, but I can't remember who she said gave it. Mom- if you remember, put it in the comments for us please!
I then just gathered up handfuls of the leaves and added them a few at a time, pressing every so often to adhere them well. I tried to use a variety of fabrics and some fabrics with multiple colors to give a little depth to the process.
After I was done with the leaves- off to squaring, batting, and spray baste. I used a variegated yellow thread to quilt the leaves on the light colored trees in a leafy pattern and a dark purple/maroon thread to do the leaves on the darker tree. I quilted different "trunky" sorts of patterns on the trees and stones on the pathway using my happy brown thread. I enjoyed doing the stones, I tried to make them get smaller as they got further back to help with the perspective. I had some trouble with the maroon thread on the dark tree, but all the rest of my threads did all right. Here are some up close pictures of the quilting. Sorry for the picture overload, I wanted to take a bunch of pictures since I'm sending this quilt off before some of my quilting buddies get to see it.
I used this nice mottled batik for the back. Unless you look too closely, you can see the quilting but not the mistakes!
This was such a fun swap, thanks so much to Jenna for hosting it an I hope my partner loves her wall hanging. What about you guys? Are you guys participating in any swaps right now?
