Anne’s Creative Threads

I have frequently used this jungle plant in my art quilt wall hangings, either featuring the whole plant or using it as a detail in one of my larger rain forest pieces. I don’t know what type of plant it is but I love the curves of the leaves and the pronounced veins, perfect for interpreting into applique.

This time I wanted to try something a little bit different and just focus on a small detail of the leaves to create a more abstract design. It is an idea I’ve wanted to explore for a while and I was finally inspired by Katie Pasquini Masopust’s book: Design Explorations for the Creative Quilter where she devotes a chapter to exploring details of images.

I cropped the above image where two of the leaves overlap and create an interesting pattern.

I printed out the image and made an drawing on tranparency film which I thne scanned and imported into my Electric Quilt programme to create a pattern. Once the pattern was drawn out I went through my stash of greens  and chose over twenty different fabrics to recreate the shading in the leaf and add variety and interest. I printed out the pattern from EQ6 and traced one copy onto a satbilizer to use for the background and another copy onto freezer paper to use as a working pattern.

To make the design I cut out each section one by one from the freezer paper, applied it to the right side of my chosen fabric and then used starch and an iron to fold under the raw edge. Each piece is then applied to the background stabilizer and pinned, then I stitched each section in place using invisible thread and a reversed blind stitch.

The picture above shows the first sections stitched and further ones pinned in place and ready to stitch. I have used a mixture of batiks and tone on tone fabrics for greater variety and to add interest to the design.

This photo shows more leaf sections stitched in place. And finally the finished design.

I added a bright green narrow accent border and I outline quilted each individual section of leaf using rayon thread.