Liberty birds and kashmir

I've mentioned my second Elizabeth Wall quilt a couple of times recently and now it's time to reveal all! At the same time as I was working on my Four Little Birds quilt, I started on this second design. It was actually the first one of hers that I'd seen as several members of my quilt group had worked on the design at a workshop.

This time the design is a tree. You start with a simple outline of a tree and build up the foliage by cutting out motifs from fabric backed with Bondaweb. I used a Hoffman fabric 'Kashmir' for the leaves: it comes in different colourways but I just loved this blue design. The flowers and two little birds were cut from a Liberty fabric which I was given many years ago and also appears on Chickpea's heart quilt. I hadn't planned on using it but the tree needed some extra colour and it fit the bill nicely.

The quilting was a very simple outline so as not to detract from the tree and because the background fabric is quite busy already. The borders were an afterthought and luckily I'd left plenty of extra backing and wadding around the edges so that they could be added. I think it would have felt unbalanced without them.

OK, have you had enough glimpses? Do you want to see the full quilt?

Here goes....

Ta-dah!

For those of you who like to know these things, it's a petite 42cm x 38cm and the blue is much more of a turquoise in reality. I'm still playing around with a name and initially thought of 'Liberty in Kashmir'. However, that sounds more of a political statement than a quilt so I'm having a rethink!

I'm showing it off with Four Little Birds at my quilt group tonight. Aren't they going to be amazed? Two quilts in two months - it took me 8 years to finish the last one!