Trees

I didn't think of anything original to call this quilt, so the label says it is "Winter Trees."

I was very happy with the way the quilting came out. Here are some closeups of the stitching on the silk areas. I used a variety of leaf designs and backgrounds.


On the left in the above photo is an Ann Bright design and on the right is a stencil. All the pieced blocks are stitched with the freehand wavy diagonal lines visible around the silk pieces in these closeups.

The design below is adapted from a pantograph. I really like the freehand vertical lines - they were fast and easy so I'll use that idea again.


This fern is also a stencil design. Our kitten Lily tried to help and one of the leaves is misshapen, but I left it that way in her honor.



These oak leaves and acorns came from a book of quilting designs that I was given by a friend who was retiring and downsizing.



Here are a few more pantographs and stand alone designs.

The design on the pale blue-green below was freehand tree-trunks and with leaves and little broken-off branches. On the right is a portion of a pantograph I designed using leaves I picked up outside and more freehand leaves, large and small.


There - photos of most of the silk areas. My main goal with this quilt was to quilt on larger pieces of silk. I used silk thread. It turns out the shiny silk fabric made quilting extremely easy even with the nearly invisible silk thread. My eye could so readily follow my previous stitching lines, which is not always the case, particularly on prints. Even prints that read as solids can pose problems that the satiny silk did not. But you would not want to make mistakes and have to rip out much: If you snag satin, it would certainly show. I only had to remove stitches once or twice when I ran out of bobbin thread and wanted to take the stitching line back to a less conspicuous area of the design for the join.

Each silk piece was backed with a very sheer fusible interfacing to make construction easier. I was a little afraid it would reduce the impact of the quilting, as it did make a difference in the hand of the silk. Happily, whatever it did, the quilting still stands out.

I used two layers of batting, with a polyester batt on top of a cotton batt pieced from remnants. The poly helps with the pouf, as does the second layer. To help the quilt lie flat after all the quilting and finishing, I steam my quilts. I steamed the front side, where the poly is first - it did not help at all and the quilt was very wavy and would have been embarrassing to show hanging up. Steaming the back side where the cotton batting is made all the difference, though it could use a little more work -- I was anxious to see the finished product and hung it up before the quilt was completely cool and dry!