It's a Banner!

When I sat down to sew my leaf blocks into a table runner, I suddenly changed my mind! I blame it on those stark, white sheets of drywall that seemed to be screaming for something to decorate them. I decided to make two simple banners instead - one for my shed and one to give to a friend. The scan of a portion of one banner shows the fabrics I used. The other graphic shows a rendering of the banner made with Electric Quilt software. You can get the applique patterns and very basic instructions for making this banner on my website: http://www.sundropdesigns.com/specialdays.html

Kitty Block

My sister and nephew showed up without warning on Saturday to put the drywall up in my sewing shed. Needless to say, my sewing plans flew to the wayside. It took me the better part of 3 afternoons to get things back in enough order that I could sit down at my sewing machine today and finish the alternate blocks for my Halloween table runner. But the disruption was worth it as the drywall will make my shed a warmer place to work.

For my altternate block, I decided on a black kitten batting at a falling leaf. It's cute, but I've dicovered that I have a difficult time seeing what I'm stitching around when the applique is black.

More Fall Leaves

I collected fallen leaves from the silver maple tree today. This is my favorite tree on the property because there's such a variety of colors and sizes. Leaves on the other trees generally turn just one color or another, often a dull brown.

I chose 4 leaves of various sizes and traced them on brown freezer paper to make templates to keep on hand for future use. They look wrinkled because I salvaged this paper from a box of art supplies that I ordered years ago - the paper had been used as filler instead of styrofoam peanuts. Of course, I had to try a couple of the templates out now using some fabric scraps. Wow! I really like how this simple block turned out. I'm now inspired to make a few more to make a small table runner for the bowl of Halloween candy to sit on.

By the way, I noticed something odd about the silver maple tree: only the leaves on the east side of the tree are turning color. The leaves on the west, south and north sides are all green!

Leaf Quiz Answers

This is the answer sheet to the leaf quiz. How many did you get correct? It's not that easy to identify a tree by just the leaf or a leaf without its tree. After scanning the leaves, it took me 5 minutes to remember what tree or bush the grape leaf was from!

Leaf Quiz

I took a walk yesterday to check on the blackberries and ended up stuffing my pockets with a variety of leaves (I stuffed the blackberries in my mouth - mmm, yum!). How many leaves can you identify? Hints: Most of the leaves are small ones, not grown to full size - that way I could get more of them on my scanner. Near the bottom left corner, there are two leaves from the same tree: one shows the top color and the other shows the underneath color.


Here's the list:

apple

big leaf maple

bracken fern

cherry

Douglas-fir

filbert (hazelnut)

grape

ivy

lilac

morning glory

plum

silver maple

sword fern

viburnum (snowball bush)



I could have included three kinds of blackberry leaves and a holly leaf, but I didn't fancy getting my fingers pricked. I'll post the answer sheet a couple of posts from now (that way the quiz and the answers won't appear on the same web page). Good luck!