Spring

So where do you go when the first quilt of a series is Mother Earth?  Hmmmmm.  I started looking at my stacks of fabric for inspiration.  And I found the perfect piece.  I could see the design almost immediately.

Here is what the fabric looked like before I started to chop it into little pieces.

Of course what I really mean when I say "chopped" is that I did what quilters call Fussy Cutting.  That means taking scissors and carefully cutting around a design.  Using teeny tiny scissors with serrated edges for some of the small areas.  I added fusible webbing to the back of the fabric before I started cutting.

Here is how the design that I used for Mother Earth looked when it turned into Spring....

 

I originally planned to have some of the green foliage stick out from a regular green fabric that would be exactly like the design on top of Mother Earth's head - but it did not work out that way.  For this particular design it needed to be different.  That makes me curious to see what direction the next quilt in this series will go.

Here are some details to show the beads on the flowers and the ferns and the fancy-schmancy  (my made up word) stitching that I used to secure the edges of the fabric. More on that particular subject in just a moment....

Securing the edges.  Ha!  I learned a very (!!) important lesson with this quilt.  Do you remember the picture of the fabric that inspired this design?  Well it is beautiful fabric but it is NOT quilting fabric.  Nope.  It is upholstery fabric.  Which I learned (after all that fussy cutting and fusing and putting the fabric down on the background) is very very very hard to sew into without shredding the fibers so that they stick out all ! over ! the place !!

YIKES.  I was actually flamboozled for a while trying to figure out what to do.  But then I just revved up my Bernina and chose some fancy-schmancy decorative stitches that would secure the edges.  Whew!  And I also used beads and tiny stitches by hand to secure other areas.  Lesson learned.  No more upholstery fabric no matter how pretty the design is.