In The Garden

The current challenge from Art Quilts Around the World is called "In The Garden". I had a great time doing this quilt. I originally thought about doing a keyhole that you are looking through to see the whole amazing garden but couldn't figure how to do that on this scale. I then decided that I wanted to go the route of a secret garden and finding the door to it hidden along with the key. 

This is the quilt that I came up with. 

The first thing I did was quilt the wooden gate by taking hand painted brown fabric and tracing the grain of the wood on my table onto paper, pinning that to the brown fabric, in sections, and quilting. Here is just the wood. 

Next, I cut the piece down to the correct size, and added the lock and vines. 

Then I sewed individual leaves using fusible web to make them two-sided. Once the leaves were made, I determined how best to place them on the vines and sewed down only the stems so that the leaf can blow in the breeze. I then attached a red ribbon with a small key with the word "dream" on it that I purchased from a store on Etsy onto the vines. 

I decided that I didn't want to do a conventional binding on this, so I just satin stitched all around the edge and left it a little rough. 

Like I said at the beginning of this post, I really liked doing this challenge and think that this is one of my best pieces to date.