Yesterday I Made Leaves

Yesterday I was going to bind my Plum Millie quilt.  I made leaves instead.

On several recent dog walks, I saw houses with purple or orange lights on their trees.  Pretty!  I decided I should retire the elephants from my elephant tree, wrap the branches with lights, then make leaves to hang.

Here's the starting point.  The elephant tree was in a turquoise ceramic pot, but now I was in the mood for this neutral-colored pot.  After potting the root ball of this tree, I added some stones on the bottom, but not too many.  The pot was heavy enough as it was.  I filled the rest of the empty area with crumpled newspaper.

 

The pot has a really rough bottom, so I have it sitting on this plate.

The stores were out of orange lights, so I bought a box of purple.  But they were so dark you couldn't see them in the daylight, so I fetched the strand of yellow and white lights I had in the basement.  I wrapped and wrapped and wrapped the 20 feet of wire around all the branches.  It wasn't any fun, and it will be even less fun when I have to unwrap it.

It makes sort of a gobby mess, so I need to train my brain to only look at the lights, not the wire.

At the base of the tree, to cover the newspaper, I piled on thread and felt balls.

I made nine different leaves, seven of which I'll show you.  All of them are wool or felt on the front, fused to fabric, held together with a variety of free motion quilting.  I did a little beading on all of them.  Not a lot, because I wanted to finish the project in one day.

This leaf is brown wool.

The orange leaf is also wool, but the yellow one is felt with a tie-dye pattern.

This leaf is felt, with snippets of fabric and beads layered on top.

This is my favorite leaf, made from tie-dyed felt.

Another felt leaf, with snippets of Plum Millie scattered across the top.

This is my goofiest leaf, because it doesn't look like a leaf silhouette.  I like the color, though, so I kept it.

Now I need to get Plum Millie bound, so I can move on to another quilt.  I have one UFO from 2-3 years ago and it really bugs me.  I don't need another one.  My goal is to do that binding this weekend, then start out next week with a cute little project.