Quiltmaker's 100 Blocks Vol. 14 Blog Tour - Modern Oak Leaf

Welcome to my stop on the Quiltmaker's 100 Blocks Blog Tour for Volume 14!

The tour has been happening all this past week - please visit the Quiltmaker's blog to find links to the blogs on the tour.  

Quiltmaker's 100 Blocks Blog Tour

I hope you will spend some time visiting my blog. I've been sharing online since 2009 and participated in the Quiltmaker's 100 blocks twice before.

I have several tutorials for projects that are perfect for gift giving - or any time of year, really!

Sew Joy Creations' Tutorials page

 


On with the tour!

I called my block, "Modern Oak Leaf". It's a very simple, large applique leaf that is actually based on a real leaf!

I picked up this large leaf on a walk last fall. I really wanted to create something with it. Originally I traced the block onto an 81/2 x 11" piece of paper and made plans to use it as a quilting motif in my Harvest Joy Sampler. But then I got distracted with other quilts and never finished putting my quilt top together to get to the quilting. 


So I decided to use it as an applique instead and submit it to Quiltmaker! I did make some artistic changes to make the leaf easier to translate to fabric. I made it symmetrical by only drawing one side of the actual leaf and placing it on folded fabric to create my applique. Putting it on an angle in the block meant that I could keep it "actual size" then I repeated a basic patchwork design in two corners to add some visual interest and opportunities for the block in repeat.


I made a couple of virtual examples to share with you:

Here is a lap top quilt made with 6 rows of 4 blocks each. It would be approximately 48 x 72 inches long finished.  My modern version of an oak leaf applique quilt is created using a solid background colour and one colour for the patchwork and another for the leaves. The blocks are simply rotated to create the look above.

This scrappy version of the block creates a bedrunner approximately 72 inches long and 24 inches wide. The scrappiness is controlled a bit by using the  same background colour for all of the blocks and one colour again for the leaves. Don't look too closely at my "scrappiness" as it isn't really - I needed to move more of the blocks around, but you get the idea! 

With Joy,

Sarah V.