The Birches, Days Two & Three

Day 3 (Monday) was a lot like Day 2 (Sunday): lots of ironing and poking myself with pins. I realized last night when I finished version 1.0 that my hands were stinging a lot from all the straight pins and the occasional iron burn.

Let the record show for those that do not believe that I do iron sometimes. Not my clothes, but I’ll iron for hours for applique, apparently. I would like to note that I believe this fabric is not entirely cotton. The fabric bundle I inherited dates to the days before manufacturers had refined their synthetic fabrics. Although this kind does not melt as some used to, it does give off a distinct odor of mothballs when heated. CHARMING. Now that I’m on about hour 5 of ironing it, I’m not noticing so much anymore, though.

Speaking of applique there are 2 types of hills, 2 types of flower patches, 2 types of trees of different length and branches so far. None is pieced, it’s all applique. You can see some of the pieces below, and the waviness of the brown/amber fabrics that made me think of hills in the first place. You can also see that the “branches” (top right) involved a very narrow piece of fabric to iron, which occasioned much quick finger snatching out of the way. The bottom right picture is where I actually was at the end of Sunday (Day 2), having pinned on all the “hills.”

On Day Three (today) I moved past hills into flowers and trees. The bottom left picture is some of the fields of flowers and snow that linger in the hills. Maybe you can start seeing that this is a very Nordic winter scene? Flowers do grow when it’s really cold up near the arctic circle, but sparsely. So here’s the end of Day Three, an ironed and pinned “rough draft” with hills and some plants on a cold day, with the choppy water below and the freezing sky above. So is it starting to look like something yet?