Queen Anne's Lace Details

 Yesterday I showed you my newest quilt finish.  My Four-in-Art 12" challenge, Queen Anne's Lace.
Today I will show you a little more about my inspiration and how I put it together.  Warning: There are lots of pictures.

 I started with this picture.  I had it printed both in 4 x 6 and in 8 x 10.

 On the computer I blew the picture up - a lot.  I had originally thought, many months ago, that I would do a quilt like this for a Keepsake Quilting Challenge.  Then I realized we would be traveling way too much and it would never get done, so it got put on the back burner.  This challenge was a great chance to bring it up.

 Here is the printed picture, blown up and taped together.  Keepsake Quilting challenges are always for 30" quilts.  Since this is a 12" challenge, I cut out a 12"+ section.

 Then I pulled out the light box and started tracing.  Not perfectly tracing, but making sure to get the major features.

 Traced again on Wonder Under, in reverse, to use as pattern pieces for fusing down.

 Then I auditioned some fabrics against the actual picture.
I went with a variety of whites and cream for the flowers, and one green batik for the stems.
 Then its a matter of fusing to fabric, cutting, placing and fusing to the back ground.

 Here is a little series of building up the picture.

 Some of the petals I used actual traced pattern pieces, for many of them, I just cut out a bunch of random flowers form the various fabrics.

 I use the pattern overlay to make sure placement is correct.  In this case, approximate was really good enough.

 More fusing, building the picture.  I brought this one up north to work on.

 Here we are with all the pieces fused on, pin basted and I'm starting to sew on the beads.

 I originally was going to do a bead on each flower, and thread outlined petals on occasional flowers, but I found that they really needed the detail to distinguish them from one another.

 This is a shot of my left over petals, which I also used for testing.  To me the green really was a part of the flower, and I found that the random green and white beaded centers worked really well.

 A shot of the back.  I went with a narrow binding, since its a smaller quilt, which proved to be hard when I also applied a sleeve into the seam.  The quilting looks like a bunch of snow flakes to me.

 I tried to echo that in the brown part with 5 pointed stars.

 I kind of want to go in and put about twice as many brown stars into the background for the quilting, and I didn't do any stitching on the green stems, but I couldn't think of any stitching that would work.  So I guess we'll call it done.

 Elizabeth has announced our next theme, due Feb. 1.  Trees.  Ah, so many possibilities.