A Finish and a Nap???

I hope you had as wonderful and productive a day as I have.  I started and finished one piece.  Then worked on another piece that I've had on the long-arm for a while.  

And I climbed in the hammock in our backyard for a bit of relaxing.  Our summers are much too hot for lying outside, so I'm trying to take advantage of the beautiful sunshine and cool breezes that we've been getting.

This is a very rare selfie!  I don't like being in front of the camera any more than I like taking the pictures.  Imagine my aversion to taking pictures of myself! But, well, I was enjoying the afternoon.  

So enough about me--back to today's accomplishments.  
I decided to create a teaching piece for a talk I'll give at our next guild meeting.  The subject is how I create my art quilts.  The second piece I worked on is an art quilt that will be completed in time to show at the meeting.  This piece is meant to help explain the steps that I use.  I decided to create three trees of the same general shape--each one in a different stage of completion.

The first section, on the left, shows my color palette, and the second shows the beginnings of my picture.  To show that I use any fabric that will work, I've included black netting, which I also use for shadowing.  I begin quilting the background when largest parts of the picture is in place, so I echo quilted around this section of the work.  Finally, I used white thread to stitch around every piece on the picture so that it will easily show.

In the third section I've quilted the background and begun adding some details.  Everything is "pinned" in place with stitches that will hold it down just enough to move the quilt from the long arm to the Bernina.  The details that are in this section are the bird nest, the squirrel hole, and the grass.

The last section shows the thread painting that I've added to finish the piece.  Notice how much thread painting I added to the detailed parts--the bird nest, squirrel hole, and grass. I spent maybe 15 minutes putting in all those stitches using the Bernina stitch regulator.  The only thing left is to bind the piece with black binding, which I like because it frames the artwork nicely.