Celestial Winter: Wall Hanging, Post Cards, and Ornaments

I recently did a favor for a friend and to show her thanks, she gave me some fabric. There was one piece in the bunch, a fat quarter titled "Celestial Winter" by Jason Yenter from In The Beginning Fabrics that I was immediately drawn to.

Now I like to tell people that I let the fabric tell me what it wants to be. Sometimes fabrics just tell me that they want to be place mats or table runners. Other times it's more specific. Back when I was making "Early Morning Nine Patch" I was trying to decide what fabric to use for the barn when I realized that the title on the selvage edge was "Barn Red" so that time it was literally speaking to me.

This time Celestial Winter was speaking to me and it said "Use me."

"But I have to work on stuff for the upcoming Open Studios," I replied.

Celestial Winter loudly repeated "USE ME."

"I really don't have the time," I replied.

But it would not let me ignore it.

So I did. I made a wall hanging, ten postcards, and five tree ornaments. In one week. (I had to work quickly because I still had things I needed to finish for the Open Studios that was less than two weeks away).

Here is the fabric before I cut into it. (This is not the actual piece that I had, this is the preview that In The Beginning Fabrics has on their website). I ironed fusible adhesive (Heat-n-Bond lite) on the back of the whole fat quarter then cut the shapes out. This is called fussy cutting and it doesn't get much fussier than this, can you see how close together the images are? In some places I had about 1/16" of an inch of black left around the shapes. I wanted a little bit of black around them so when I fused them to a back background it would look seamless.

I fused six main pieces to a black fabric from my stash (one that I used for "Lavender Diamonds").

I also fused some groupings of stars on most of the pieces. Four around each round shape and two with the deer and the owl.

I pieced the six rectangles with green sashing and borders then sandwiched the quilt top with a cotton batting and backing.

I stitched around the fused pieces with black thread on the black edge that I left when fussy cutting.  It was pretty hard to see when sewing down but I took it slowly and did it. Because it was already sandwiched, this is also the quilting.

I also quilted stitch-in-the-ditch around the edges where the black was pieced with the green.

Then I folded the front around to the back for a binding. I added sleeves and a label.

I love how it looks like the fabric is glowing from within.

Because I already had fusible adhesive on the back of the fabric, I took used the other large images, some which were cut off because they were at the edge of the fabric, to make some postcards.

I used the same black fabric for the backgrounds and added the red and blue stripes which were not a part of the original fabric. Then I fused them to a thick innerfacing and satin stitched around the edges with a black thread.

There were also nine colorful trees. They were too small to be postcards so I fused them to a green fabric, then fused them to some innerfacing (the kind I use for postcards) then satin stitched around the edges with a green thread. Because there were nine trees, four of these are double sided.

As always, you can click on the photos to see them larger.