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.