Quilting the Elements: Air and Water

Step-by-step, I am making steady progress on The Loon Lake Quilt.  This weekend, I quilted the backgrounds for the Air and surface of the lake blocks.

Background quilting for AIR.

The quilt paper with cloud motifs sewn onto the background of the sky blocks. 

I used a light colored blue and lilac thread that blends in nicely with the sky colors-- which you can sort of see in the photo at the top of this post.

 I spent the morning tracking down a suitable cloud motif, then right-sizing it and then tracing it out onto quilting paper.  All that tracing is time well spent in getting to know the motif, putting it into muscle memory, so that it's easier to stitch out when I get to that stage. 

Here I am stitching the clouds onto the sky blocks.  From this angle, they kind of look like bat wings -- Or maybe that's just late October spilling through?

The quilt paper is tissue paper that I can sew through and see through -- which allows me to avoid elements in the quilt that I do NOT want to sew over.   In the case above, I did NOT want to sew clouds over the green hills.   The quilting tissue paper also tears off easily -- esp. after it's been perforated with the stitches.  Having the lines drawn on paper gives me a road map for sewing, otherwise I get lost.  

Here's the goldfinch.  The clouds just happened to line up nicely to outline his head.  I did not stitch clouds over the irises.  

 

Here it is with the tissue paper torn off.  

 

Background quilting for WATER. 

I used a different motif for the surface of the water on the lake.  

Again, the tissue paper helped me place the motifs while avoiding the appliques elements of the quilt-- like loons and water lilies and dragon flies.

 

Here is the same block with the paper torn off.  

 

In real life, the loon is popping out of the quilt, while the background is pushed back.   

Now to figurte out what to do with the remaining blocks ...