Day 107 – Leaf Curtain

Well, it seems like I can never be happy with the weather no matter what time of year it is.

In June, it’s hot and I crave cold weather and now in December it’s cold and I’m dying for some heat and sunshine.

So instead of pining for what we can’t have, let’s instead infuse our quilts with a fun, tropical design like Leaf Curtain:

Today has been a super “getting things done” day. I went shopping (a very rare event for me), picked up my noggin from school, came home and worked on contracts for lectures and workshops for several hours and now I’m almost ready to start wrapping presents!

Whew! I feel super-duper productive, which is great because I’ve set the goal to finish my Winter Wonderland quilt by Christmas.

In case you’ve not seen this quilt, here’s a little reminder:

Of course, I don’t plan to have it together by Christmas day, just completely quilted. Right now I’m on block 7, so 5 small blocks and the one big center block are left to go.

So that’s one block a day and 2 days for the big center block and I’ll definitely have this one done!

Inspiration – Trailing Leaves really came out well, but I wanted to try another version of this design with a slightly different leaf and vein shape. It just goes to show that changing only 1 thing can create a totally different design.

Difficulty Level – Advanced. This is not super difficult, but there is a lot of traveling involved. Just take it slow and keep your hands close to the needle while traveling over your previous stitching.

Design Family – Edge to Edge. The leaf shapes are filled working from one edge of your quilting space into another. This means that this design will work nicely in the open, uncomplicated areas of your quilt, but probably not as well around tight areas.

Directional Texture – Two directions. The way I’ve stitched this in a row makes the leaves have a very horizontal or vertical texture. Of course, you can always stitch it more randomly and it will have an multi-directional texture instead.

Suggestions for Use – About 10 years ago now, I created a necklace called the “Swamp Necklace” which was full of muted greens, browns, blacks, and cream colors.

One of these days I’m going to recreated this necklace in a quilt with the same colors. Of course, with a name like “Swamp Quilt” it’s going to need filler designs like Leaf Curtain and Trailing Leaves in order to really work, right?