Arbutus Leave

I love trees! I love bark, moss, roots, leaves -you get the idea I love trees and everything about them! So for some unknown reason I drew a blank as to what I should make when " leaves" came up as the challenge. So blank that I didn't start this piece until 5 days ago.

I just had to look in my own backyard.

I'm from the east coast and we don't have Arbutus trees there. I'm fascinated but the way they shed their bark and their leaves.

I waited so long I had to use what was in my stash.

I picked leaves from the yard and used them as " models". I cut leaves from each fabric. I fused two layers together so I had some stability for stitching. Then I used water colour pencil crayons and Inktense pencils to colour each leaf.

I was pleasantly surprised at how the leaves turned out. So now I present to you my Arbutus Leaves.

In Pusuit of Purple by Margaret K,

LEAVES – In Pursuit of Purple
I love leaves.  From previous posts, you know I live on a small acreage with trees – lots of trees – deciduous, evergreen, native and non native, fruit bearing, shade providing, upright, weeping.  Leaves, ferns, mosses, vines, creepers, needles, bracts.  Green, red, orange, yellow, brown.  And purple/burgundy!  Huchera, Japanese maple, frosted fern, berberis, smoke bush, black beauty elderberry, cut-leaf weeping Japanese maple.  A beautiful warm sunny day, so time for sun-printing.  I didn’t like my mixed Setacolour red and blue for a red violet, so used their pre-mixed transparent parma violet as a background.  After drying in the sun and ironing the fabric for colour fastness, I painted some Lumiere burgundy lightly on some of the background as most of the leaves are in fact burgundy, not purple.  Then some pearl white on the two Japanese maple leaves to give them a bit more oomph.  Very light quilting around or through the images, self binding and I’m done.  I’ve included two photos of other leaf projects I’ve done over the years.  

In 2006, I used a photo image of two of my grandchildren (4 and 1) playing in a pile of maple leaves in October 2002.  The leaves were snippets of fall colours.  This was one of my first ventures into textile art.  The kids are now 17 and 14!  I call it “Pure Joy”.

In 2010, I created “One Red Leaf”.  It is a celebration of a young man’s life that ended far too soon.  The leaves represent us all, how we are the same but different and our differences should be celebrated, not belittled or bullied.  

LEAVES

I'm off on a trip to UK for 2 1/2 months so managed to get my challenge completed early before we leave on 12th June
I picked some leaves off a tree in our garden and used these for the challenge. The autumn colours are exquisite here in NZ at this time of the year.
I painted a piece of white cotton fabric with Gesso and traced many different sizes of leaves on and then when this was dry I painted them. I then put some iron on vilene for stability and free motioned stitched around drawing outlines and the veins in the leaves. I then cut them out. I then took a piece of silk I dyed in a Shibori dyeing class and used it on the background and after drawing and painting  visoflex with acrylic paints I ironed these onto the background and sewed leaves over top of  these areas. I enjoyed doing this challenge    

My goodness, I completed this early. Leaves, love leaves but here on the coast of Australia we don't get the beautiful coloured leaves from deciduous trees.
I drew the leaves on white homespun and coloured them using Inktense pencils and then used Jo Sonias textile medium to blend the colours. I then made a quilt sandwich and free motion quilted the leaves adding their veins before carefully cutting out and placing on a piece of handdyed fabric, a bit more quilting and done. Hope your enjoy.