Weeping Cherry Tree Quilt

My neighbor has a beautiful weeping cherry tree in the corner of her yard. Springtime, its pink blossoms cover the branches; summer, the leaves are lush; fall, the leaves are golden and orange; and winter shows the skeleton of the tree. Pictures were taken each season, fabrics dyed, discharged, overdyed, painted, stenciled and stamped. I had the makings for a quilt. I started with the pictures and photo enhanced the colors, cropped and used filters to get pictures from each season. I printed them on cotton lawn fabric. These were fused onto background fabrics with curvy edges.

I pieced background squares using a crazy patch design and sewed them together with the photo picture pieces.

Something was wrong. It wasn't coming out like the picture in my mind. I looked at it for days and couldn't come up with a solution. It was driving me crazy, time to step back and work on something else.

The quilt top hung on my design wall for a while, I needed some input. Two of my quilting friends, Martha and Eda critiqued the quilt for me. Using their comments, I went back into the piece. The large spring photo I made brighter since this was the focal point. The pieced background was too chaotic and distracting, so I toned it down with gesso. I then stamped leaves over it to take away some of the brightness of the pinks and reds.

This was better but I still was not overjoyed with it. I should have just given up. But, I had put a lot of work into it, so it was getting quilted. I stitched in the ditch around the pictures and meander quilted with dark green thread in the background. Because of the gesso painted on the background, the stitching is not good. I couldn't keep a good tension and sometimes it would skip stitches or the thread would break. The pictures needed quilting to keep the density of the quilting even. For these I used the braches as a guide.

Below is the final quilt.

Even though this quilt wasn't a success, I learned from it.

1. Not to use a busy background, the color values were too varied in each block.

2. Make sure my pictures are clear without distracting elements in the background.

3. Stitch first then paint on gesso. The gesso makes the fabrics stiff which makes quilting irregular.