I do love that Falling Mountain quilt, if I do say so myself. Hope you do too. Now, I have to do a bit of backtracking, though.
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If you've been reading closely, and I'm sure you have (whatever), you'll remember that I've had multiple projects on tap for about a year and a half now. You'll no doubt recall that I've only been quilting for a year and a half, so that means that I've always had lots of projects beginning and ending. Trouble is that they don't end in the same order as they begin. That means that documenting them in a blog such as this creates a bit of a challenge when one is deciding upon the order of presentation.
I've left this quilt until now because... uh... well... because... I felt like it.
Remember Explorations in Denim? In that post, I mentioned that, when I was first learning to sew, I was infatuated with seams. I know it's dorky, but there ya go.
I also mentioned that I was sewing whatever fabric I could find. The two fabrics that I began with were twill (what I used to call khaki) and denim. With the denim I made two quilts that I've documented in the two posts Explorations in Denim and William's Quilt.
About the same time, I was also busy cutting twill pants into strips. I arbitrarily chose to cut three and six inch strips. Before long, I had a large stack of twill strips. Then I decided to sew each size end to end to make two very long strips. I had no idea what I might do with them, so I rolled them up, and figured that someday I'd find a use. I did it mostly because I wanted to do it. I know it's weird, but sometimes one does things just for the hell of it.
If you'll recall Explorations in Denim, you'll also recall that I made that quilt in a "quilt-as-you-go" method. I thought that I'd do the same thing with the twill fabric. I made a few twill panels and connected them but, to date, I've not finished that project. I got distracted by other projects.
Much later, when I was making William's Quilt, I had the idea that I'd pull all those strips out of the bin and sew them together to make the back for his quilt. Once I got them all sewed together, though, I saw that it looked pretty cool, so I instituted a change order.
My idea now was to make this "back" into the front of another quilt. I was fortunate to have an old duvet cover which could be used for the backs of both The Khaki Quilt and William's Quilt. Chance favors the prepared mind, right?
Oddly enough, this is the first quilt that I made that I actually liked. Something about it made me feel happy. I decided to keep this one.
I made a quilt sandwich, quilted it in the horizontal ditches, and, presto, I was done. It's a very simple project which made a heavy, durable quilt.
Feeling satisfied with a job simply and well done, I was innocently reclining with the boob tube playing when I had a disastrous thought: I saw something in my head that I had to do to my quilt.
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Why oh why does my brain have to think so much? I'm told by experts that this is simply the price of genius.
Leaves.
Here's the thought I had: I could go into the yard and gather some leaves, trace them onto some paper, then sew over the lines on the paper to make a leaf skeleton. I imagined that they would look sort of like the leaf tracings the our teachers used to force us to make in elementary school.
Way back when I was in school, there were no computers. We still used crayons, believe it or not.
Pretty brilliant, huh?
Here's some food for thought: the way to identify a genius is to find someone who agrees with you. All such people are, by definition, brilliant. I don't know many geniuses. I reckon that most folks are just not smart enough to agree with me very often. Being a genius is lonesome.
Since this was an experimental quilt to begin with, and since it was destined to be my own quilt, I didn't really care how it turned out. That's a real advantage when one is trying to perfect something new.
I didn't know what color or weight thread to use. I started with a small (50wt) thread, but I didn't like that very well. I bought some 30wt and some 12wt thread to use. I really liked the 12wt, but I couldn't find the variety of colors that I had in mind so I ended up making most of the leaves with 30wt thread.
Here's the front of it all put together.
Even though this was an unplanned quilt, I like it very much. It's the only thing I've ever made that I want to keep for myself.
As I was playing with these leaves, I had a brainstorm that I will document in a post called Libby's Leaves.
Aunt Libby loves her quilt.
Not a bad job for an old grouch.
Enter your e-mail address at top or bottom of the page and be notified about our next adventure: Libby's Leaves. It's a show-stopper. Really.
TheCurmudgeon, Closet Genius
quilt looks great!
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