I like making landscape quilts, often with trees in the foreground. With a new quilt I finished in early February 2019, I took a different approach. I had noticed a unique tree in my friend’s front yard last summer and wanted to turn it into an art quilt. It’s uniqueness was its trunk which was really three trees sort of growing together. I didn’t want to blend this tree with a bunch of other trees so I designed a one tree quilt. It was fun to create a smaller quilt after having spent most of January making very large custom orders.
All of my art quilts involve curved piecing. With a tree quilt such as this, there is an added challenge to figure out how to layer the branches and the trunks so it flows and makes sense when you look at it. I cut out the tree pieces, put together part of the sky/leaves in the upper half of the quilt, then cut in the branches. The three distinct trunks were added after the rest of the quilt was designed and sewn together, again, cutting them in and piecing them into the quilt…not applique or fusing.
It is always fun to select fabrics for the landscape part of the quilt which in this case was both foreground and background of smallish hills. I did some creative free motion quilting in the landscape part of the quilt. For the green leaves section of the upper half, I basically stitched in the ditch. For the sky I did some wandering curvy lines just to give some texture. The second photo which is more of a close up helps you see the stitching.