Celebrate Color!

So my apologies to everyone who has already seen this quilt, but I decided to enter it into Celebrate Color so I needed to make a new blog post.  I've been ogling at all the fabulous fall projects over there, if you haven't yet you should check it out, it's a great compendium of all different kinds of fall-inspired crafty creativity.

I originally made this quilt for Jenna's SewHappyGeek Tablerunner/Wallhanging swap.  I just found out today that my partner received and loved it.  I was super excited to get to make something fall oriented.  I love fall, the colors, the temperatures, the brisk breeze and falling leaves, the smell of the first fireplace fires.  I have wanted to make a fall quilt for a while, so this was the perfect opportunity and turned out to be tons of fun!

Here's the finished wall hanging, it's about 24" square.  If you're interested, I've described my design process a little bit below.

I drafted my pattern on 8.5 x 11 paper, then traced it onto a transparency and blew it up/reversed it using an overhead projector.  Here's the full size pattern copied onto freezer paper.  I foundation pieced the tree trunks, and the whole thing was assembled using Caryl Bryer Fallert's appli-piecing technique (previously described here and here).

The leaves were cut out of fusible-backed fabric using a scallop-blade rotary cutter then fused to the top a few at a time.  After squaring up I layered the backing and batting and free motion quilted in patterns that I thought looked good.  I used this fun mottled batik for the back.

I had so much fun making this quilt and I hope you enjoy looking at it.  I want to let everyone know, if you've been hesitant to try an "art quilt" or something without a pattern, don't be!  The freezer paper technique I use (of Caryl Fallert's) is super easy and enables anybody to design pictorial quilts.  Happy Thanksgiving everyone!