Welcome Swallow Quilt

It's come to my attention that I've been remiss in not posting one of my quilts that I finished earlier this year (thanks Carol!).  It got lost amongst life I guess.

I love Welcome Swallows.  They are a small bird with a forked tail.  They make mud nests around human habitation and seem curious and lively.  I love the colour palette of their plumage too - indigo blue, grey, and burnt sienna.  I thought I might make a quilt using their colours and silhouettes of Swallows.

Here's how it started on my design wall.

I pieced a background using flying geese and half-square triangles and then began auditioning for hills as a foreground.

Eventually it morphed into this - dark indigo silhouettes of the Swallows, indigo and grey hills with touches of burnt sienna and mustard and burnt sienna barn.  I used discharge paste to create a line of trees that receded into the distance and this is about where I stalled.

I put it away for ages.  Eventually (and in a Spring kind of mood) I pulled it out, removed the hills, unpicked some of the sky to make it square and added grass and flowers to the foreground instead.  I added some colour to the bird silhouettes and added one larger fully coloured one in the foreground.

I free-motion quilted and appliquéd at the same time as I like to do and then free-motion quilted a flowing pattern in the sky using my domestic Bernina Aurora 400 QE.  I changed thread colours from  mid-blue at the top of the sky, light blue in the middle and cream near the grasses.

The grasses and flowers were free-motions appliquéd and quilted with matching thread colours.  I decided to bind it in similar colours to those in the quilt to have a border, but one that worked with the quilt.  You can see my scientific way of measuring those chunks of colour in the picture above.

And here's the finished quilt.  Once again my colours have been extra-saturated (I'm beginning to think it's the watermark program I'm using - time for an experiment I think).

Detail of the sky quilting.

Detail of the foreground Swallow.  He was done with coloured pencil and fabric medium on white fabric then cut out and appliquéd/quilted on.

And the pretty flowers, done in my hand-dyed fabrics.  I think the whole quilt has a completely different feel to it now - Spring rather than Autumn.  But I'm still interested in re-visiting my previous colour scheme.  However I won't be using those hills, I cut a few strips from them and used then in my Cerego 12 x 12 Purple Challenge quilt, the little pops of orange came from here!

And because I had to dig it out to photograph it, now I have this quilt hanging next to my sewing machine here on the boat.  Both Hubby and I love it, so I think it will stay for a while.