Fifteen backyard birds in felted applique with lots of hand embroidery and felted mushrooms. There are lots of opportunities to "slow" stitch while making this pattern into a felted applique quilt.
This is the second time we had our pattern cover printed on 11" x 17" paper. It will fit nicely in a 12" x 9" zip lock bag, and show detail color photos of many of the birds and some of the mushrooms.. You can create your own arrangement which makes it more fun to make. This is not like a paint-by-number project. There are so many ways to personalize this pattern. In the PDF pattern I have scanned the cover and created four pages for you, with close up photos of different birds and mushrooms.
This pattern has five pages of general instructions and four additional pages of instructions for the embroidery stitches that include how I embroidered the overlapped seams between the background blocks, and 11 pages of drawings for all the birds for the appliques and mushrooms.
The wool fabric appliques are poked in place on 10" square wool backgrounds with the felting tool to temporarily tack them in place. You need a 2" thick piece of upholstery foam to support the backgrounds and appliques to protect your leg or the table. The color of the applique doesn't matter since it is covered by the next step: poking the appliques with wool rovings (fibers). The felting tool I use, has 3 close together barbed needles. You poke the fibers into the appliques with the tool and all the fibers in the appliques and the backgrounds get hooked together, creating felt. Some of leaves can be 3-D, by felting the fibers by themselves, without an applique, turning them over again and again while you poke them. When the resulting fabric can't be pulled apart, you can use scissors to cut them into the proper shape. You could make a wing to place on a bird body to make the wing more like a bas relief. When you overlap the backgrounds you can felt them together, then add embroidery over the seam to make the whole quilt top exciting to look at.
My quilt measures 39" square. Your quilt could be much larger depending on how much time and effort you want to put into your quilt. My hand dyed wool quilt is made up of eleven 10" square backgrounds (cut to suitable sizes) and four 6" blocks for cornerstones and 2 strips 6" x 56" for the borders (I cut them in half to make the top/bottom and left/right sides). Since they are all one of a kind, I would hand pick them for you if you'd like a kit.
I used Fairfield's craft size Fusi-Boo (bamboo with fusible on both sides). I only quilted the backgrounds. I quilted whole quilt on my home sewing machine, a Bernina 1230 which I bought in 1989, with Sulky's Blendables,cotton threads in space dyed colors. The backing and the binding are cotton quilt weight fabric.
If you choose the PDF pattern you will receive it in an email, and you will need a working printer to use the pattern. I will send it to you with 24 hours of your purchase.
Click on the photos below to see them larger.
