Confetti Quilt Scene

I had the great pleasure last November to participate in a class held by an extremely talented and innovative quilter by the name of Ethelda Ellis. You can check out her blog here

http://ethelda.blogspot.ie/

She was giving this class for my monthly patchwork group and she was teaching us a technique she calls confetti quilts. This is a great technique as it utilises the tiniest pieces of leftover and scrap fabric you might find in your sewing room and under your sewing table. 

Ethelda was so kind as to provide us with enlarged copies of photographs she took of forest scenes and trees, we each picked a picture and went to work to create a little quilt, approximately 8" x 11" in size, depicting what we saw in the picture.

Here is the picture I chose, I was drawn to the autumn colours.

She then taught us how to break up the big picture into small colour sections and we gradually built up the fabric and fibre layers to show the scene (or individual tree) we each had chosen. Everything was then covered with netting and quilted roughly with invisible thread to hold the layers together, but for me the great fun started with the real quilting, with coloured thread. I made leaf shapes in various autumn colours, chose a different quilting pattern for the sky and the underbrush. The only thing I did not get finished that day was shading the trees and binding the piece. I finally got a chance to do this during my patchwork groups last patchwork meeting and I am very pleased with how it turned out. I might still appliqué some single leaf shapes onto the border in a corner, to be honest, I haven't yet made up my mind. What do you think?

Here is a close-up of some of the quilting and shading. You might be able to see how small the fabric pieces are.