Birches Update

I’ve been plugging along on the quilting-embroidery for the birches quilt.  Which I realize at this point should be named Birches/Aspens, because the brown pattern is the paper bark birches and the gold is aspens.  I’ve been trying to find a picture of the scene that really inspired this quilt.  It’s hard because the scene is from my life.  My brother once lived in a grove of aspens on the side of a mountain, and there were birches there also.  The rustle and chime of the leaves, the starkness of the trunks during a snowy winter, the curling white of the bark all remind me of the chilly, sunny peace of that place.

This is the current state of the quilt. The embroidery is free-form, and hard to see intentionally, it’s of air. It’s of leaves falling down from the trees, doing that twirling and falling thing the leaves do, and eventually settling in some random spot on the hills. The wind’s colors are silver and blues, while the leaves will be various colors of gold.

Of course, the other part is to just sandwich the pieces together, and that did just fine for that. Needs more, though. I was full of it when I said it would take just one week. That was a really poor estimation. I have a lot of leaves to put on now, some on the ground, and a few left on the branches, the very last ones of fall. It’s fun though. It’s laborious and time-consuming, but then I guess it wouldn’t be worth it if it weren’t.

That’s the back of it. It’s hard to see the front, it’s a lot of texture, but the back shows what I just did. I think all that texture is lovely.

I’ll be starting the leaves tonight. Not sure how I’m going to do them yet, but birch and aspen leaves are fairly simple. I was thinking of outlines, we’ll see how that goes, but maybe I’ll have to fill them in a bit. We’ll see!