Water Dance

I had a big blank wall in our master bedroom that needed something on it.  It’s the first wall you see when coming up the stairs and looking into our room.

I made the king sized quilt and shams on our bed with cool aquas and blues, purples and lime greens.  I have a quilt of those same colors on the bench at the bottom of our bed and on the quilt rack in there, too.

I saw an art quilt on Pinterest that had weeping willow branches over water.  It was so pretty and Monet-like.  It inspired me to do my own take on such a scenario… and the colors were just what I had in mind.  So, I went through my stash and pulled only those colors.

I pieced the background using 5 1/2” squares laid out in an offset ten rows by 10 columns design, giving me a 50” square quilt size.

Next, I pulled a brown for the branches and lots of different greens for the long thin willow leaves.  I pressed fusible onto the back of them and just freehand cut some long wavy branches from the brown and lots of long thin leaves from all the greens.

With the fusible on the back, the branches and leaves would not stick to the vertical background on the design wall, so I laid it out on the guest room bed.

And fell in love.

I just loved the whole look of it.

After I had it all laid out, I used a dry iron to tack the pieces onto the background while it was laying on the bed, so that I could lift it and carry it to my Big Board ironing board in my sewing room to fuse the pieces down permanently.

Next, I cut out the backing and batting about 2” larger all around and pinned the quilt sandwich all over… on my awesome kitchen island!

I stitched around the edges of all the fused applique pieces,

then the design thread lines, then fill in the background with wavy watery stippling.

Bound and labeled-

my new “Water Dance” quilt is on our bedroom wall.

Making me happy every time I come upstairs and see it!  :-)

What are you up to this week?