Branching Out

Next weekend, the quilt guild here in Washington, NC will present a quilt show "Branching Out".  They have created a raffle quilt of leaf blocks that is named "Free Falling".

Continuing the tree theme, the members have been challenged to create wall quilts to display as a group.  Here is progress so far on my quilt.

I started very simply with the outline of a tree, sky fabric (printed that way - what a find) and green on the ground.  I stitched around the edges of the shapes with embroidery floss, then hand quilted vertical lines across the entire piece using #12 pearl cotton.

After considering various stitching options to add twigs, I decided to paint. I added a little fabric medium to acrylic paint and used a credit card cut to various sizes to add the brown lines.

They don't show up too well in this picture, but I added small leaves to the branches by making dozens of little "fly stitches" in two shades of green. What you see on the left side of the picture is polymer clay leaves.  I'm working on that today, adding the 3-D element last.

It will be finished and turned in on Tuesday.  I'll post pictures of the final product.