The Blue One

Sweet little iris we saw on our walk this morning.

I have quietly been laboring over the larger blue piece for my quilt series. I finished the one I started a while back....but I'm not wild about it for a variety of reasons.  So I started over...a couple of times actually. 

I finally have a simple design that I'm reasonable happy with and works better with the rest of the pieces.  For part of it I used another piecing technique to make a simple "stick tree." The background is a rich hand dyed blue...one of my favorite fabrics. The trunk and the branches are all pieced in.

I did simple outline quilting around the tree.....lots and lots of lines.  I thought the back looked kind of fun....it created kind of a shadow tree.

 

I also strip pieced fabrics that coordinated with the Kaffe stripe.

I pre-quilted it on very thin batting.  I trimmed it up and treated it just like a piece of fabric.  I did it this way because I wanted to hide all my starting and stopping under the seams with the solid blue.



Here's a glimpse of it put together.  I need to trim it up and bind it....but the blue one is going to be OK.