Alice: The Majesty of Birch Trees

 I struggled with this theme at first.  All I could come up with was "purple mountains majesty," but I feared that someone else might use that one.  Good friend Linda Hicks, one of our first but now former Mavens, suggested I look up quotations using the words majesty or majestic.  Then she sent me a batch!  I loved one by American writer Washington Irving that says in part: "There is a serene and settled majesty to woodland scenery. . . "

Knowing that New Englander Irving likely often saw birch trees in woodlands near him, I recalled a length of batik that I treasure that depicts birch trees.  (In fact, I've used this fabric twice before in my MM quilts,  for the themes Translate and Boundary.)  

I assembled a background of sky, hills, and foreground using batiks, cutting them freehand and fusing these onto a muslin base.  I sandwiched this background with batting and backing and lightly quilted it.  Then I applied Steam a Seam 2 to a section of my treasured birch tree batik and cut out seven trees.  These I then adhered to the base; SS2 can be repositioned, which is handy when composing, but ironing makes it permanent.  I touched up the trees with black and white Fabric Fun Pastel Dye Sticks.  

For the fall leaves I assembled small pieces of yellow, orange, and tan batiks and began cutting them into "confetti."  This confetti technique Rita Schormann demonstrated to us at our first MM retreat on Nantucket Island.  These had no fusible product applied, but I did apply some SS2 to a few larger cuts and then I snipped these into tiny pieces and stuck them down one by one to be falling leaves.  The confetti pieces I scattered onto the tree tops and the ground.

To keep the treetops and piled up leaves in place for quilting, I covered the entire quilt with white tulle and then free motion quilted through the tulle at the top and bottom of the quilt.  

Once the quilt was finished, I was in a quandary about what to use for binding.  I auditioned many fabrics; all seemed to be too distracting.  Then I remembered a technique I learned in a class taught by Marcia Stein.  I pieced the side edges using the same fabrics that I used for the background, and for the top and bottom edges I used some of the yellow batik.  At last I was content with my woodland scene quilt!