fiberhart

Encore

Amazingly enought, I have spent time the last three nights in the studio- after ten hour workdays. I am hard at work, making leaves so I can start sewing them on the quilt. Here's my progress so far--



Initially, I thought I would fuse the bottom layer of leaves to the quilt, then just sew the topmost layer. So, I made my first batch with fabric that was fused to Wonder Under. When I started playing with them on the quilt, it became obvious that the dimension I'm after would be lost if I fused the leaves. So I needed to revise my plans, and here's the process I've come up with.

I made scans of actual leaves a few years ago. I played with the image- made it smaller, and distored some of them. Then I printed it on my laser printer.



Then I cut out the leaf section, leaving a stencil. (Look close, that's my rotary mat under the paper.)



Then I trace the leaf image onto freezer paper, getting as many on as possible on the sheet..



I then cut out the leaves, and iron then onto double-sided fabric- two pieces that have been fused together.



That's as far as I got tonight, one leaf. It takes A LOT of time to cut out all those leaves! Tomorrow I'll finish cutting them out, iron them on the fabric, and start stitching around the freezer paper. The leaf edges will be raw, but I wanted some edge stitching to prevent most raveling. And, I'm adding stitching where veins would be. Not a lot, but it does add to the effect. I'll stitch over one of those lines when I sew them onto the quilt.

Hopefully, I'll get some sewn on Friday morning. My WAQ group is meeting Friday afternoon, and I'd like to get their reaction.

And, after several days of lovely, early spring weather, it looks like winter is making another visit. We're supposed to be stormy Friday, then a large storm should roll in Sunday night and Monday, leaving us snow once again. Let's just hope it disappears as fast as the last dusting did!