bloggers quilt festival | Evening in the Garden Quilts

Here is my entry in the Wall Hanging category of the Blogger’s Quilt Festival at Amy’s Creative Side. Make sure you go over to see everyone’s work. The show is always fantastic.

I am fortunate enough to live on a hill in a wooded area, and this was my view one fall evening as the sun was setting. You know you own a lot of batiks when you can walk inside and pull the perfect sky fabric immediately. Most of the fabrics in this are batiks.

I hung the sky on my design wall, layered the “ground” fabrics over it, and cut the trees and trunks freehand. I used a glue stick to adhere them.

Then I cut the design to size and framed it with green grass and blue sky. I really love the textured blue batik fabric that contains hints of purples and oranges from the scene.

The fallen leaves on the grass are bits of scraps from the trees. I laid them on after the quilt was sandwiched, covered them with water-soluble stabilizer, and quilted over them to hold them on.

I quilted inside the trees to hold them in place, leaving the edges to fray in the wash. On the sky and on some of the trees I followed the fabric motif as a quilting design. I backed this and bound it in a brilliant orange tie dye print. I am very happy with the way this turned out. It’s my very personal fall landscape.

“Fall Glory”

Valerie Root

Wall Hanging

32″ x 38″

Machine pieced and appliqued

Machine quilted

Wow, I had a hard time choosing my favorite quilt to enter in this show. I really like several of the things I’ve made this year. In fact, I started a post on “Windflowers” before I realized that this was my favorite. For today.

This is “Ocean Breezes”, made in early July. It’s made from 176 HSTs, in a variety of textured fabrics.

I wanted that breezy, summer, beachy feel, so I used several seer suckers and an embellished white cotton that had pin tucks and rick rack .

This was my first foray into fabrics like these for quilting. They were stretchy and finicky, but we got along all right, and everything came out square enough in the end.

The pale yellow back was hard to photograph. I pieced it with a strip of seer sucker.

I quilted this entirely with white Bottom Line by Superior Threads. I stablized the lines between all the blocks first, then did the diagonals in one direction only. I’m very pleased with the alternating wavy lines. My favorite comment from a viewer: “I can feel the breezes!”

The best part about Ocean Breezes is its new home. It was purchased by a woman who had an antique family quilt in aqua and white (unusual, I think, she sent me a picture), and she felt that this one was meant to come home to be with hers. I couldn’t be happier.