"Flowers in the Forest"

Earlier this year, when I discovered that my LQS was going to have a Kona club (at my suggestion) I figured that I should get my body moving and make something to be used as an inspiration piece and (and I must say AND......that hopefully I might be able to use for some swap too.)  During the Christmas break when I was just playing in Flickr and pinterest, ('cause my machine was packed away) I discovered a black and white drawing of a rug hooking pattern by the famous, Karla Gerard that I KNEW I'd have to do in fabric.   So.... as soon as my tree was down and I was back in business, I got to work.  First I fused some white fabric and cut out my trees.  I thought a blue background might be fun for a change:

I sewed the trees down right away because I wasn't sure how I'd be able to get to all the spaces after all my "flowers" were fused down.  Note the circle flowers starting to bloom.........(I cut three different sizes of circles and a bunch of different colored leaves.)

At this point all my circles were fused down and it was a matter of making my quilt sandwich and getting going.  I loved the clean look of the circles, but thought a different approach might be fun too:

Can you see how I thread painted all the circles to make them look fuzzy?  I thought it gave it sort of an ethereal affect.  Sort of mystical, if you will.......!!  Note that I also quilted the spaces in the blue spaces between the trees in order not to have it gap or wrinkle.  When things are so tightly quilted in one place, anything left unquilted has the possibility to wrinkle so I wanted to squash that in the beginning.  Next was the buttons and french knots:



And a close up:



I added some hand stitching too just to make it look more colorful!  Don't look at the back though.....not a pretty sight:

That was over 100 buttons, my friends!  I thought I'd never get done!  Good thing this ugly side will be against the wall, huh?  E-gads!!!  It ended up at 14 by about 22 inches.  Now, onto the next!  (Once I get rid of this lousy cold.  Now I'm coughing to beat the band and my nose is running all over the place!  Ugh!!!)