Mini-WILD Flowers

I had several people interested in the large WILD Flowers, but one of them preferred, 'just a taste' rather than the entire buffet...so, I made a mini-WILD Flower. There will be several more minis, as I have had so much fun making the flowers I have a miniature Mount Rainier pile of them ready to use!

Hand dyed background. Free motion embroidery leaves. Hand wrapped, machine 'quilted' flowers and grass. 11"x14" artist canvas mounted, ready to hang.

Poinsettia 'leaf' Applique'

Tree Skirt with poinsettias appliqued.

Here is another 'leaf' you may play with. I used the same basic method covered in my Leaves 101 tutorial ( http://quilts-artfromtheheart.blogspot.com/2012/05/leaves-101-tutorial.html ) and similar to my 'daisy flowers'. http://quilts-artfromtheheart.blogspot.com/2011/07/how-to-build-flower-101.html
Because you are using the rinse away backing to sew on, you must link the center's yellow portions a little, but the method is great-it allows air space around each one, just like the real plant. This one is rather large as it will be one among many in a larger piece of work, but you could 'whip up' miniatures in no time to mount on pin backs. The Holiday bazaars are coming soon! Get to it! :?}

WILD Flowers completed!

     In an earlier blog I gave a tutorial on making these wild flowers. I have now completed this piece and am madly making tons more flowers, as there seems to be more demands for it! Yeah!
     I am working on more of the wild variety, but have also started a silver gray color scheme, and a naturalistic yellows/browns theme to mimic sunflowers.
An important follow up I am going to add to the tutorial is the 'learned the difficult way' information regarding the background. Choose your background colors and size, piece, quilt and bind it, THEN place your flowers, stems and leaves onto it. I used masking tape to hold all the fluff and stuff aside while I struggled to quilt, which made it doable, but still difficult!
I will post a picture soon of the sunflower or gray theme, as I have come up with a further embellishment-little flower as center of big flower. Way cool!

Experimenting

I have been keenly interested in the felting/embellishing field day going on throughout the quilt art world. I drove a friend's felting machine for just a moment, but it was enough to help me decide I want to do the slow, old fashioned way of felting/embellishing, by hand. I want to be able to arrange and poke and arrange and poke, adjust, add, stab it some more...this is the result of my first attempt. Nothing to send home to Mom, but it is as fun as I thought it might be to do! I plan to take classes while in the UK, and come back a pro. :?}

Spring Green REALLY done...

Spring Green, when you last saw it, had an inefficient stick stuck through the hanging sleeve. The new owner requested that the 'soft' wall hanging be made into a 'hard' one. I achieved that by extending the mountains into the borders and mounting the entire piece on foam core, covering the raw edges on the back with a large piece of spring greens batik. I like this so much better! It truly looks complete now...

Last Vestige

 

 This was started during my very fun, creative, restive Art Camp week. Just finished it yesterday. I had to be in the proper mood to make design decisions...I loved creating the quilting; free motion/no pattern/leafy leafy. The gold background is one of my hand dyes, the tree is of commercial fabric. The leaves are the ones I tutorialed on this blog. I cropped the photo too closely to show, but there is traditional French binding around the perimeter, except in the root area of the tree. I left that 'raw'.