Sweetheart Tree
There are so many good quilting blogs out there that you could spend all your quilting time reading about quilts. One of the ones that I keep up with is Quilt Inspirations. A while back they actually featured my Dear Jane Quilt and mentioned this website on one of their blogs.
Among many other things they feature free pattern links, and one I kept looking at was the Heart Tree by Liz Jones from her book Flowers, Hearts and Garlands. You can get the downloadable PDF pattern as well (at least at the time of this posting) at American Quilter. I decided to make it for a guild challenge called Secret Garden.
I used four different batik fabrics. I initially cut out the teal tree fabric and then just randomly cut out the heart shaped leaves from the pastel batik. When I got the leaves placed it was obvious that random would not work as well as I had hoped. To really sparkle the leaves needed to contain a bit of the yellow. So I recut about about half the leaves. When you put your quilt on the design wall and something doesn't work - change it. I designed the border on Electric Quilt but had the border flipped 180 with the black on the outside. Again that wasn't working and fortunately I was able to flip it and as a friend said, "Now the points lead your eye to the tree." This wallhanging is 26" x 26". It is raw-edge machine appliquéd and stiple machine quilted. I did hide a few pictures within the quilting.
Next: The Blue Cat