Autumn Leaves – a January OMG Finish

‘Autumn Leaves’, my patchwork wall hanging is completed – a Happy Dance has been performed! At the start of January this project was a quilt sandwich that I’d put to one side when back in November the pressure to move onto projects with Christmas deadlines became too strong to ignore.

I decided to take part in the January One Monthly Goal link-up, stating my determination to see ‘Autumn Leaves’ quilted and bound before the end of the month. I actually finished the quilt last Monday but have only just woken up to the fact that the link-up deadline is only a few hours away!

To recap, ‘Autumn Leaves’ was an unplanned project inspired by orange peel templates given away with Today’s Quilter magazine. I tried out the templates straight away and liked the results – the curves are gentle so relatively easy to pin and stitch. At the time I bought the magazine we were blessed with some beautiful Autumn days – the rich colours of the leaves were enhanced by the  clear blue skies – it didn’t take too much imagination to see the template shapes as leaves…

Quilting the wall hanging: I wanted to make the orange peel shapes more leaf like. I began by using a very close zig-zag stitch to create a leaf stalk at one end of each of the shapes before switching to a straight stitch to echo around them. Then it was time to drop the feed dogs and attach the free motion foot to my machine to stitch the ‘veins’ onto the leaves.

I wanted to stitch a pattern onto the blue background which would represent the wind blowing the leaves in all directions against the bright blue sky. The bands of wavy lines and swirls are my attempt to add ‘movement’ to the quilt. The quilting is by no means perfect but I’m happy to be practicing FMQ on actual quilts rather than on practice sandwiches.

It took me a while to decide on the binding. In the end I made a scrappy binding using fabrics matched in colour to the leaf shapes. I machine stitched the binding to the back of the quilt and then machine stitched it down onto the front.

The finished quilt measures 44″ long by 26″ wide. It is hanging in our hallway – not in the least bit seasonal – but it is now a finish and not a Work In Progress, or, heaven forbid, another Un-Finished Object!

Linking with Elm Street Quilts for the One Monthly Goal January Finish. 🙂

Allison