Bird of Paradise Convergence Quilt - Part 5

I've been quilting the first of the 2 wall hangings and I decided to try something that was a bit different from my usual ways of quilting. I wanted to use the shape of the Monstera leaf (see picture below) as my quilting pattern and I wanted the size of these leaves to be relatively life like. They typically grow from 12" to 36" in size and given that the size of my wall hanging is approx. 31" square this would mean that there wouldn't be that many of them. Also I wanted them to overlap one another like they grow in the wild and I wanted the design to go to the edge of the quilt as well so that in some cases the leaf image would only be a partial.

So here is the end result. If you click on the image you should be able to see the details as well I have a close up of the upper left hand corner .

I really like the way this quilting turned out.

I'm also working on some thread painting that will become some applique that will be added to this quilt. I'm not sure yet if I'm going to do the same with the dark one. The thread painting is done on Pellon's 541 Wash-N-Gone stabilizer. This stabilizer has the look and feel of the tear away stabilizers and handles quite nicely. It's not as gummy as the Sulky wash away stabilizer which looks and feels like plastic. I'm still trying to figure out how many layers are best, 2, 3 or 4, or perhaps go with 2 and use an actual tearaway stabilizer on the back.

Here's a funny story. When I was quilting the veins of the leaves, I was working on my 5th leaf and all of a sudden my machine started to make funny noises and then it went back to normal. Then it made some more funny noises and then back to normal. This happened 4 times until I realized that somehow a file folder that was sitting at the end of the sewing machine cabinet had moved while I was manipulating the quilt top and eventually lodged underneath my sewing machine and was being stitched to the back of the quilt. At the time I didn't think it was too funny because I had to stop my sewing, get the stitch ripper out and extract the file folder from the back of my quilt. At that point I figured it was time to go do something else and come back to the quilting another time. Here is the remaining evidence on the file folder, which now I can look at and laugh but at the time it happened I was not amused.