Scrappy Leaves quilt

Dear Blossom of Friendship followers,

The Scrappy Leaves quilt is almost finished. Just a few more hours on the binding then the hanging sleeve and it will be ready to hang up in the shop. It's always a good feeling to get something completed before teaching the class!

The quilt took me two and a half days of laborious stitch in the ditch around each leaf and border sections on my long-arm. Stitch in the ditch quilting is not very much fun. It becomes tedious and doesn't seem very creative. I'll quilt feathers any day over ditch work.

My admiration goes out to anyone that can machine quilt a large quilt on a smaller machine. The next time you see your machine quilter, give them a hug......they deserve it! Machine quilting takes a lot more time than you think. I usually spend about one hour just loading the quilt on the frame. It has to be perfectly lined up or else you'll pay for it when you get down to the end.

The whole idea of this quilt was to imagine the sun shining down from the top left hand corner through the leaves and trees in the forest. I can't tell you how many times in my walks around the neighborhood that I was trying to capture that feeling. On my walk with Zinny this morning, we saw our first dogwoods ( I think they are dogwoods) changing color. They weren't changing much, but there was definitely some fall color.

I used wool batting so my leaves would just pop right out. I quilted swirls to depict the wind carelessly tossing the leaves every which way. That's my story because my swirls are quilted every which way. I'm consistently inconsistent with the entire quilt.

Look what ambled by the critter cam last night on the game trail! We've never had an animal get this close to the camera.....ever. So, if you go out in the woods today.......................

As always,

Lynn