Spring Green Progress

This past week I spent a good amount of time on this project. Since the background fabric is complete, I focused on the subject and the foreground. On Wednesday, I got out my fabric paints and created some terracotta and dark neutral colored swatches.

While the fabric was drying, I finalized the design layout. Because the foreground was the interior of a building, I decided to use the piecing instead of applique technique. The stitch lines would be straight and follow the lines of the greenhouse interior. Here is the full-scale drawing that I used to make the pattern pieces.

Next I traced each of the lettered sections, cut the traced images apart, pinned them to the fabric and cut each piece.

Following my decision to use a reverse-applique technique to replicate the little seed pots, I had made a template with elliptical shapes. I now traced these shapes onto the corresponding fabric pieces.

Everything looked like it would fit. Starting with piece A, I sewed the pieces to each other in alphabetical order and stitched the resulting block to the background fabric.

My vision is that the bright green color glowing up from each seed pot symbolizes the energy released by the seed as it germinates. You know what I mean – like the way superheroes are drawn.

Here is an image of the project as it stands now.

I awoke several times during the night to ideas about the next step swirling around. I had so many of them! When I awoke early this morning, I could recall only a few. Too bad. I guess I could force myself to get out of bed when this happens, track down my notebook and write those ideas down. But I digress.

The next steps involve adding some final touches of paint, stitching down the raw edges of the ellipses and making the quilt sandwich.

I will also practice drawing and stitching the seedlings before working them on the real thing.