Adventure Quilter

Working on this quilt inspired by fall foliage, I added many more little orange bits.

Hmm, maybe I got carried away there. I removed a few and it looked better.

And here it is finished, called Mid-October.

I liked it.  But something was bothering me.

Ellen Lindner
P.S. Have you ever had that nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right?

Remember the great fabric I used in my quilt Initial Response? I still had half of it, ready to use on the next project. This portion made me think of fall leaves, with the twigs and branches of trees peeking through.  Can you see it?

That was enough to get me started.  From there I cut it into 9 pieces.  (Not square, of course.) If you look closely, you can see the cuts, above.

I decided the feature fabric should be about 1/4 of the quilt design, which helped me determine the size.

I put 4 of my 9 pieces in the corners and scattered the others throughout.  Then I started filling in with fabrics from my stash, both commercial and hand dyed.

Soon, I had this.  “Not bad,” I thought.

I added a little more interest with some small snippets of plaids and stripes.  And then began to audition twig fabrics and widths.  I decided most of them would need to be pretty skinny.

I added QUITE A FEW twigs and was happy with the results.

As I thought more about fall leaves I realized I should probably add some color variations.  I tried several fabrics in the orange family. Some were very bright and sort of took over.  Maybe I could still use them in small pieces.  Others were too dull and were removed from consideration.

In the next post I’ll show you what I did with these fabrics.

Ellen Lindner