Cherish Nature - Part 1

I'm starting the preliminary work on a new quilting project that is going to be based on Moda's Cherish Nature fabric and the pattern that they developed for this fabric.  I found out a little while ago that our cat sitter Lyn is going to be 75 years young this September so I wanted to make a special quilt for her to commemorate this major milestone in her life. I've got 2 months which I hope will be doable.

I initially saw this fabric when several of the gals from our small quilt group went on a shop hop back in May and one of the gals bought a kit to make this quilt.  The fabrics were gorgeous.  Now I'm going to be modifying the pattern because first I wasn't able to get all the fabrics that they had recommended since I was trying to find them after they had been out for a while and second the size of the finished quilt would be too large for me to do the actual quilting on my machine.  Here is a picture of the original pattern.

I'm not going to be adding the final floral border which will reduce the size of the quilt by 12" both in width in length.  In addition I will be changing the small green border to the egg fabric that is on the brown background. The half square triangles will be slightly different in that I don't have the green bumble bee fabric, and in its place is the aqua bumble bee fabric.  I have the dark aqua sponged fabric but not the light aqua one so in it's place I have the natural sponged fabric. I do have the brown swirl fabric. 

Below is a picture of the full panel that portions will be used for the quilt.  I'm thinking that the other parts I may use on the back with Kaufman's fusion fabric in espresso.

The one thing that I wanted to do on this quilt is a trapunto effect on the egg borders.  This time I had a different idea from what I did with the cardinals on my Christmas quilts from last year.  I decided to take Misty Fuse and fuse it to some batting. Then using an egg shaped template, cut out egg shaped pieces from the batting.  Here is my test using the aqua egg fabric.

Next I placed the egg shaped pieces of batting with the Misty Fuse side down on the wrong side of the fabric over top of where the egg shapes are.

I folded over a piece of parchment paper and ironed on the egg shaped pieces of batting to the fabric.  When I ironed, I made sure to iron both sides to ensure a good bond with the Misty Fuse.

This is what the pieces of batting look like after they have been ironed onto the back of the fabric.

Next I put together my regular quilting layers of back fabric, batting and top fabric.

This is a picture from the top of the layers.

Then I free motion quilted around the egg shapes.  This is just a rough sample and there is some puckering because the fabric is not sewn down to anything else so it was moving a bit while I was quilting.  The egg in the lower right hand corner turned out the best.

This is a view from the side and as you can see the eggs do indeed have a dimension to them.