Garden Lady #7 - part Five

This is a continuation of 4 previous posts about the making of Garden Lady #7.

The next step was to add garden/flower details.  I sketched up a few ideas - fun flowers, realistic daisies, trellis, shovel, birdhouses and a fence.  I like to use this small sketching technique when I'm designing quilts.  It really helps me visualize different options.

I liked the first two the best and started drawing and placing ideas onto the quilt top.  The final design included daisies, birdhouses, and some birds.   I made a bunch of turned edge daisies and pinned them up to see how they looked.  Light shades of pink and yellow were used for the flowers and a light orange was used for the centers.  These gave the art quilt 3 variations of daisies - the white ones in the printed fabric, the stitched ones on the pocket, and the ones floating in the background.  Repetition is very helpful on art quilts, and in art in general.  It's one of the small details that I consciously include that most viewers won't recognize, but somehow will feel that the piece is cohesive.

Next were the birdhouses, which were made with 2 different fabrics for each house and black holes for the centers.  I used the dissolving foundation for these too, so that all of the edges were turned edge.  I wanted the poles to be different for each house too, and these were made by starting with 1" wide strips of fabric, turning both raw edges to the center, pressing and finishing at 1/2" wide.   Those pieces were appliqued to the background with invisible thread.  Then, I used antique ribbon, seam binding, and fabric strips to make the stems.  Here is a picture with those pinned in place.

I hand appliqued down all of the stems and decided to add a few tufts of grass here and there, a few leaves, butterflies, and birds.   Finally, I added fingers and a thumb on top of the bouquet.  The top was all ready to quilt.

I hope you like the quilt top and get a feel of being in a daisy filled summer garden.