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The Top Layer of Tree Spirits 2


After painting the third, larger tree spirit on the left, I began to construct the tree trunks on the right and left. I pieced strips of various of my brown-ish hand-dyed fabrics, then fused strips of commercial fabrics in bark-like (I hope) shapes to the base layer. I stitched together three lengths of yarn with a multi-step zigzag several times…using dark-dark-medium, then dark-medium-medium, and eventually medium-medium-light-raffia. These new “strands” of yarn I couched to the surface for added texture.

The bottom meadow area is all stitched on a length of hand-dyed that didn’t turn out at all the way I wanted, but was just perfect for here. I had gone for a hike on nearby Mt. Battie (you must remember that East Coast US mountians are very old, and therefore not very tall at all) just before summer solstice, and the starflowers were in bloom, so of course they immediately jumped onto the quilt, along with some flat rocks I picked up on that hike. Used a layer of tulle and (shudder) no presser foot to free-motion quilt the tulle over the rocks to hold them in place, then trimmed away the excess tulle.

To finish the piece, I layered some green batik across the top and quilted leaf shapes to hold all the many layers together. I fused various greens onto various other green base fabrics, stitched leaf veins and cut out leaf shapes. These leaves were then stitched to the green batik down the central vein in the leaf, but left 3-d-ish.

I had really wanted to do a piece where the three layers were attached to a board and hang from it separated by an inch or so from each other so that any breeze or air-movement created by walking by the quilt would cause the upper sheer layers to shift and ripple in the breeze, but realized the quilt would then never make it into any shows….no way to mount the piece. So for this one I sewed all layers together under the leaf canopy, and will add a hanging sleeve to the back.

SO, that’s the long version of “how did she do that?” Hope you like…..

Cheers, Sarah

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