Spring Inspirations! 💐

Ok, so I’ll grant you that I’m a little obsessed with pet portraits…but through the years I have found lots of inspiration from Mother Nature at the weather gets warmer! Here are a few fun ideas for postcards or small quilts that you might like to try:

Long before your trees flower, the first signs of leaves against a deep blue sky are a welcome sight. Choose a favorite bark-like shade of Aurifil, set your machine to a very tight zig-zag setting, and stitch branches from the bottom. By holding down the button on your machine that reduces the width of the stitch as you sew, you can create some fun gradual effects of thinning out as you reach the end of the branch. Reach for your green MistyFused scraps, snip into leaves and lightly stitch on.

Celebrate your seasonal tenants! The “tree trunk” in this postcard was a scrap of bark that peeled off a favorite tree, while the “nest” is a heap of really tiny scraps stitched with a super-loose zig-zag stitch. (Our house is held up with Alaskan cedar trunks so we offer lots of air b&b accommodations under the eaves ;)…sorry, couldn’t resist…)

Or, pay tribute to the monarch butterflies that will arrive a little later on. I had fun depicting one of our “butterfly bushes” with a few visitors. For the butterflies, I took scraps of orange lame and traced their black markings with a Tsukineko pen, from a few line drawings I looked up online. The rest you can guess: yup, MistyFuse and Aurifil thread. The background was a lucky accident of a batik fat quarter that suggested a stone wall, like the one in my garden behind the bushes. (Moral of that story, yes buy the fabric, you just never know how it will be called into action ;).)

What are your favorite spring-inspired subjects? 🍃💐☀️