Quilting the Leaves

I'd like to show you how I'm quilting the leaves on my leaf quilt. Unfortunately, I've discovered - like so many other people - that it is very difficult to get good photos of quilting. This is about the best one I've got, and it's taken from the back (click on the photo for a larger picture).


The effect I'm trying for is veins on a real leaf, and I think it is working. In the picture, the stem of the leaf is on the right, between some of the machine quilting, and the 'body' of the leaf is on the left. I'm using pins for guidelines, rather then having a definite quilting line.

It is quite a reasnable photo of the machine-quilted leaves that Ferret did. In fact, it's probably a better picture of Ferret's quilting then of mine!

For some strange reason the big leaves seem to take much longer then the little leaves. The ratio of the areas of small:big is 4:9 so I think that the big leaves should take a little bit more then twice the time of the little ones. I can nearly do an entire little leaf in one evening of not too concentrated work. But the big ones seem to take a lot longer then two evenings.