Family Tree Wallhanging

I did it!  I finished the Family Tree Wallhanging quilt earlier in December but can only reveal it here now because occasionally mum peeps into the blog and I didn't want her to know this would be her and dad's Christmas gift.

This quilt has been in my head for about two years (you can read more here) and I am thrilled with how it turned out.  Actually, I'm thrilled it got finished at all.  Thought it might hang around in my head forever!

The names of my parents, my brother and his family and me and my family are all embroidered on the leaves.  From a distance, the names aren't obvious which allows the fabrics to dominate the quilt rather than the embroidery. And, mum and dad will know the names of all of us are there.

Raw edge applique and sketch stitching is definitely not my forte, but I think I pulled it off.  You can see my name on that upside down yellow leaf - isn't that a pretty fabric?

As you can see, I quilted the background with a diagonal grid before stitching down the tree trunk and leaves.

Just for a wee change I cut curved edges on my quilt (inspired by Judith's autumnal wallhanging from Pretty Patches magazine).  It wasn't as difficult as I imagined and makes a nice change, softening the whole quilt while it hangs above mum and dad's bed. (It co-ordinates with their bedlinens better than it does with ours in the top pic.)

My folks have been amazing support in the past two years and I wanted to thank them with a quilt that reminds them of the family they started together.  Thank you more than you can know, I love you two! xx

Family Tree Leaves

My Family Tree needs some embroidered leaves to get me going on this project.  I dipped into my 30's fabric stash (the one I'm supposed to be using for my Dear Jane quilt) and chose some pretties to work with the palette I need.

After choosing a font that meant I could fit the long names of the family on leaves as well as the short ones, I embroidered in several different stitches before unpicking them all and going back to simple backstitch.

The others looked a bit too clumsy and clunky on the little leaves and while it needs to be worth stitching them, I want the names to be quite subtle.  So, hopefully this works without the names getting too lost in the overall picture.  We'll see.

This pic shows 9 of the 12 family name leaves, and the other three are finished too now (just no pic).  Now, I need to get rid of the blue shadow from the erasable pen, but I'm making progress folks!

Come on, Sarah, you can do it!  Might make Christmas finish after all ;-)

Family Tree Plans

I'm planning again. 

This will be my last start of 2016, honest Guv! Well it will be, assuming I actually make a start on it now that I have extracted the ideas that have been floating about my head for the past couple of years and found the "design" I'm after.

Once upon a time, I thought it would be a great idea to make a Family Tree quilt but I didn't get much further than that. Then, there were a number of family changes followed by the arrival of two new little "leaves" and, because I wanted this Family Tree to record everybody's names (embroidered) I needed to wait and see what said new little leaves might be called.  So, the idea floated and flittered around in my ever decreasing brain capacity until lack of time and a wee bit of fear meant I kept putting off and off bringing it to reality.  A few weeks back, prompted by a gorgeous autumnal wallhanging of Judith's in Pretty Patches magazine I knew I needed to make my Family Tree happen.  You should take a peek at Judith's beauty here.

My tree is a completely different shape from Judith's and coincidentally, very similar to the Mulberry brand tree as has been pointed out by some lovely IG peeps.  I am a bit ignorant of such things, so please don't be cross Mr Mulberry.  I was actually going for something similar in design to this block I made for Colette in hipBees some time back.

Where Judith's magazine pattern has really helped is giving the construction information which helped me to simplify an idea I was making unnecessarily complicated.  So, embroidering leaves, bondawebbing and quilting a background fabric - here I come!

With any luck it won't take me another two years to choose the fabrics and I can have a wee portable embroidery pack on the go very soon!