Bloggers Quilt Festival Fall 2011

Hi there! Welcome to Poppyprint if you are clicking your way through the Bloggers Quilt Festival listings. Here is my favourite autumn quilt, which is hanging on my office door for the season.

I first saw a photo in Quilter's World Magazine of this wallhanging by Ellen Stuckey (I believe she's from Indiana, but I can't find a blog or website for her). I hung on to a colour photocopy of it for several years and finally found the perfect fabric. All of it was hand dyed by my friend Kathy, except for a few of the lighter fabrics, which are batik.

This entire quilt is free cut with scissors, no rulers or rotary blades. I pieced it on my annual November retreat a few years ago and made a massive mess of my work table and the floor around me! Free-piecing can be pretty wasteful, but all of the scraps were so beautiful I saved them for other, tiny projects. The quilt is not bound in the traditional way, but with a facing instead. I really liked the way Ellen had defined the two panels with an asymmetric top and bottom edge -it's a unique quilt finish.

I had a lot of fun with the quilting; using different thread colours, some free motion in the leaves themselves, but mostly straight line quilting with a walking foot on. In some cases, I used the quilting to define more leaves, like the one pictured below.

If you are not a regular Poppyprint reader, you may be interested in my recent free-cut project that I just made earlier this week in a workshop with the Quilters of Gee's Bend, Alabama. You can read about it here!

Thank you so much for stopping by. Be sure to visit Amy's Creative Side for a complete listing of participating blogs and check out all of the other amazing quilts in this Festival by clicking on the button below!