Round #4 - Christina @ WIPSandTUTS {Round Trip Quilts}

For Round #4, I had the opportunity to work on Christina's (from WIPs and Tuts) Round Trip Quilts Top.  You can see all of my related posts here and all of our updates here.  Christina can be found all over the web.... on Flickr, Instagram, and Etsy.

Christina asked for an Autumn and Woodland themed quilt.  When her quilt left Liz's she had a lovely scrappy star, some yummy apples, two hungry squirrels, and some falling leaves.  Well being a "woodlands" girl myself, I knew the minute I saw it what I wanted to add to her top:  the forest!

Image from Green Cheese Quilting.

I grew up in the woods.  My favorite place to play was literally in the trees... my brother and I would climb trees all day in the summer and hide under the lowest branches of the pine trees in the winter.  I love the peace and quiet that exists in deep in the woods; when all you can hear is the sound of the wind running through the trees and the animals chatting with each other.  There is no place better than that.

To make my trees I started out by cutting 5" strips by various heights out of the green and various sized squares out of the blues.  Then I made the two into REALLY wonky flying geese, not worrying about losing the points.  I actually preferred when they did lose their points.

After everything was pressed and trimmed to neat 5" wide I sorted them out into eight roughly equal piles.  I ended up making another, neater wonky goose for the top of each tree, as that was the only place I didn't like the lost points.

Trees in progress

Once my trees were assembled I used what I guess I would call a slash-and-insert technique to make the tree trunks, again varying the heights of the trunks.  Then the whole thing was brought up to size using strips of blue sky for the background.

Finished trees

I really love the height and weight that this gives the quilt and I hope that Christina does too!  What was really fun about this round is that while I was working on Christina's quilt, she was working on mine, and though I haven't seen the finished product of my top, I'm pretty sure we both made trees.

Christina's top after my finished addition

The trees do add a lot of green and blue to the quilt top, but I'm confident that Leanne, Mary, and Chelsea will be able to bring in some more of the oranges and yellows that Christina loves.  I didn't actually measure the top when I was done with it but I know it's about 50" across and long enough that my dear, quilt holding friend had to work hard to keep it off of the ground.  When it's done this is going to be a great cuddle quilt.

Leanne this will be in the mail first thing tomorrow!!

I'm linking up with this weeks WIP Wednesday over at Freshly Pieced.