After my very successful show at our local public library gallery, I am looking at my Etsy shop without any tree quilts. Trees continue to be very popular so my focus for the next few weeks will be some new tree quilts.
Birch trees 23 in Autumn gave me a chance to try some new techniques. For the background colors in the upper 2/3 of the quilt I usually sew strips of different colors together. With this quilt I sewed larger curved pieces together to create the motif of yellow and green which I then pieced onto a rust orange piece of fabric. 
It was a way to include wider pieces of colors instead of narrower strips. I like the way it came out.
All the trees are sewn into the quilt through traditional piecing. But another new technique was to use bright yellow and dark rust thread and do a meandering stitch over top of the trees, again to create a slightly different appearance for the autumn trees. I did not quilt the trees themselves except for the portions of the tree without the meandering colored thread, the lower half to third of each tree. Instead of vertical free motion stitching I did tight horizontal clustered stitching, more consistent with the birch bark design.
Lastly, for the border which is usually a dark color found in the quilt, I decided to use two different fabrics. One, an orange and green batik for the leafy sections of the upper part of the quilt and a dark green for the lower third of the quilt.
It was fun to try some new approaches to the regular components of art quilting.