Finish Report! ~ "Fancy Forest"

There was no way I could pass up Elizabeth Hartman's kit, "Fancy Forest," as it's the perfect quilt for us, living under our pondersoa pines!  (This was on my Q1 FinishAlong list)

I mean, look at what I found just lying there while we were taking some shots - 

We get mule deer on our hill and in our yard very often - they like our property for napping stop-overs.

There are actually 7 does in this photo if you like Hide 'n Seek

I pieced the top during spring-summer of 2016, in the same fabrics Elizabeth's was made with from her collections, and then it waited until I got a longarm. It's quite heavy with its linen background fabric and many seams, and I preferred waiting a couple of years to pushing it through my domestic. Plus, I had a Renaissance wedding to sew for the rest of that year.  :)

This is 66.5 x 90 inches after binding; Elizabeth Hartman Pacific collection and probably Kona solids quilting cotton in the features, with Robert Kaufmann linen for the background; Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 preshrunk batting

So this quilt got put onto my 18 in 2018 list - the 18 quilts I most want to finish or advance at least a  stage this year, and this was the number drawn for February's UFO challenge. So onto the frame it went mid-month, and took me 3 weeks to do up its quilting.

I combined my own ideas with influences from three master quilters. 

I loved the all-over bark-work on Elizabeth's original quilt. Here's a photo you can see that on if you click to blow it up - for some reason, I can't find any of the good photos of the original quilting to link to online.

Elizabeth Hartman's quilt

You'll see that idea play out in the background work of mine, with leaves, pinecones, pine needles, and flowers thrown in whenever they felt like happening, because I really liked the way Wendy Iris put elements into her pebbling background. I just winged this part with free-motion work when all the animals' quilting was finished.

My owls, butterflies, and bunny ears are very much like Natalia Bonner's. I wanted a woodsy-artsy vibe to ring out more than modern, though, so I did add some features on the owls' crowns and bottoms, and made faces instead of modern lines for the bunnies. 

My very favorites are the hedgehogs. They were my own idea, inspired by the resin hedgehog Scott gave me for Valentine's, coincidentally on the very day I loaded this quilt. He had no idea what was happening, so once again Quilter's Serendipity landed at my door.  :)  

I also did my own thing with the foxes. . . 

. . . And on the thistle flowers, where I used a curved ruler to try to evoke the spiky ball heads they get:

The backing is from Elizabeth Hartman's Rhoda Ruth collection. It's one of those cool times when colors/styles that are not normally my thing at all COMPLETELY float my boat, and it coordinates wonderfully with the prints from her Pacific collection on the front.

It's also one of the rare times that I've done a single-fabric backing rather than pieced in an interest element using left-overs. Boy, this fabric feels *nice* - even with such dense quilting!

I love the The only thing I wished I'd done differently - and I really should have known better - was to put wool batting in this instead of 80/20, and possibly even double-batted the wool over 80/20. It was so heavy to start with, though, that I decided to go with the lighter batting. But I do like more fill in my custom work - not a fan of the crinkly look except on vintage-style quilts.

I got a fantastic workout with tension adjusting on this! I love thread. I love to use different weights, colors, sheens, types as the ocassion calls for, and custom work on a multi-element quilt like this, with linen background, wanted all these! 

I did not change colors within a given animal or flower, and you can see that I used only 6 bobbin colors/types to the 18 top threads. (Glide and Isacord on the animals, So Fine on the background. MagnaGlides and SuperBobs in the bobbin.) 

I also got a workout on the binding, as I ditched the fabric I'd bought for that with the kit since a scrappy binding just looks amazing on this quilt. Fortunately, one piece cut on the bias from a good many of the leftovers from making the animals gave me plenty to work with:

All those colors, and wanting to control the placement somewhat, sure made for a lot of fussy seams to sew up! (trimming dogears and pressing seams open avoided bulk nicely on this quilt's edge)

But isn't the binding just awesome in execution?  

I love this quilt so much, and it sure was gratifying when I was halfway finished with the background quilting for my 20yo to come in and watch a bit and then say, "PLEASE tell me we're keeping this one, and it's not somebody else's quilt!"  :D

~*~*~

Linking at:

18 in 2018 

TGIFF is at Rebecca's this week
Whoop! Whoop! at Sarah's

2018 Finish-A-Long Q1 Reports at Sandra's