Falling Leaves

Was it an excuse to buy tons of colorful batiks? Maybe.
Was it an opportunity to experiment with colors? Sure.
Is it time to finish her high school graduation quilt? Definitely!

Follow along as we piece it together

The journey begins at the Evergreen Quilt Guild Annual Book Sale. I picked up a copy of Fons and Porter's Our Best Seasonal Quilts. The bunny quilt is really cute, the bee and flower garden quilt is on my someday list, but the Impressions of Fall wall hanging leaped off the page and directly into my imagination.

(Image coming as soon as it's quilted!)

Could we use this design, but make it into a queen sized quilt? L took on the task. She used her graphic design software to increase the block size, add more leaves twirl them into place and finally printed up a both colored and an unfilled patterns. Next step was to take out our stashed batiks.

The quilt has three main types of blocks: square, half-triangle square and stem block -- and a few more complex blocks where two colors of leaves overlap. [Add half-triangle square tutorial] The empty two spaces will be two colors leaf edges. Once arranged, I would carefully sew that section of quilt top into strips. It didn't take long to discover that this is not the perfect pattern for a person who can't easily determine rotations.

In addition to traditionally pieced, the points on the large leaves was paper pieces. You can see the three blocks at the point of this red leaf. Confession time...not all of these turned out quite so well. I published one that matched lines fairly well. Some were a bit less than perfect. We reminded ourselves that leaves so have serrations.

What colors shall we use for these leaves? We scattered fabrics across S's living room. The kitty was so excited but not a ton of help. We folded and arranged fabric piles into leaves. So we'd remember our design, we colored and labeled the pattern and the fabrics. Time to sew! The picture to the right shows a bit of quilt that hadn't been planned yet. I sent out this photo the the S's for input.

Eventually all 30 strips of 26 blocks were pieced together and the strips sewn into the inner quilt top.

The quilt was a bit small so we wanted the border to increase size as well as complement the pattern. For the inner border, we choose a narrow strip of gold print. We finished it with a leafy, 4 1/2" wide outer border

Oops!

I don't understand how we could have missed this mistake. While ironing the inner border, it leaped out at me. I sent out an emergency messages to the three S's, "Fix or leave?" The vote came back quickly:

✓ "I vote fix."
✓ "Fix it. That's terrible."
✓ "I think that might drive you bonkers if you leave it."

Four "rip it out and fix it" (that was my vote, too); zero "pretend you didn't notice." I fixed it. The fabric's pattern isn't all pointing the same direction now but that it definitely not such a blatant error.

The next stop is Trains in Tacoma where we'll put it on the long arm and do some quilting. We plan to use a washable wool batt. Watch for an update with our finished quilt. I'd estimate we'll schedule before mid April. How do you think we should quilt it?