Leaf Design with Ann Shaw

My first class at Quilting on the Beach was a 2 day design class. If you like puzzles, you would have enjoyed this class.

We were asked to bring an enlarged photograph of a leaf. Not being able to decide, I took 3 pictures. In the end, I choose the middle picture of a Manitoba Maple leaf.

Ann started off talking about the overall technique, and leaves in particular. Her class sample is of a tea leaf. (used with permission) 

Our first task was to copy our leaf from the picture on to architect’s tracing paper, and to determine the sewing lines in order to duplicate the leaf structure. The goal here was to make purposeful mismatched straight lines. 

Note that her tea leaf has long smooth lines, and the Manitoba Maple has many sharp points.  Hummm. Sometimes my decisions haunt me!

The second step was to make a freezer paper template, and to determine the sewing recipe. By writing out a sewing recipe, you had the leaf design broken into sections and had each piece labelled according to the order in which you were going to sew the pieces. This was my recipe  

After each piece was labelled, we added color tic marks and used highlighters to mark the section lines. If I had ever gotten to the sewing stage, I’m sure those tic marks would be VERY helpful.

Once our pattern was complete, we started to play with fabric on a design wall. Using the original tracing as reference, we cut out our pattern pieces from the freezer paper. These were ironed on to fabric and seam allowances were added. 

At this point you can see that my pieces are WAY too small to be workable. This is a project that will not be finished.

BUT… my leaf picture has been enlarged some more and I hope to revisit it again in the future.

I will need to start from scratch. Fortunately, I love puzzles and I loved this class.