It’s time for our last block before our next meeting when we are going to attempt FEATHERS. This will help prepare you for feathers – the veins of the leaves are similar to the movement you use to create feathers, but the leaf shape gives you a nice small area to practise in.
First, free motion your leaf outlines. You can draw these if you like but as leaves are organic, uneven shapes are fine. Next, sew up from the base point of the leaf to almost the top, then backtrack to the start.
Start working your way up one side, doing a slight curved line up and out to almost the edge, then backtrack to the stem. Up the stem a little, out to almost the edge, backtrack… When you get to the end of one side, go back down the other side. Repeat for the next leaf.
My leaves looked rather bald in the block by themselves, so I decided to add ‘wallpaper’. I did a grid of wavy lines, then filled in the alternate squares with a stipple. This is a really effective technique to highlight shapes that you want foregrounded that don’t have much fmq in them. For example, imagine a series of interlocking circles with geometric ‘wallpaper’ behind them. Let your imagination run wild!