Making Silk Leaves

At last I am back to working on my silk quilt which is the final assessment piece for my Patchwork & Quilting Level 3 course.  I am aiming to complete this City & Guilds course by Christmas this year as it has been going on far too long.  Already I have signed up for the Level 3 Machine Embroidery course and which I started some years ago before changing over to Patchwork & Quilting so now am keen to get into that course properly.

The silk quilt I am working on has been designed to have trailing stems, leaves and flowers of a Myrtle plant around and over some of the perfume bottles already appliqued on to it. 


Today I am making loads of silk leaves. The method is to use two different coloured silks with both interfacing and Bondaweb in-between.

Iron the silk flat, fuse interfacing to the wrong side of the first colour (I have used black fusible medium weight interfacing which you can see in the photo below applied to light green silk).

Next draw the leaf shapes on to Bondaweb and fuse to the other colour silk (I have used dark green).  Then cut out the leaf shapes which do not need edging due to the fused interfacing and Bondaweb.  Also because they are cut on the bias and bias cut silk does not fray.  This would also apply if you were using cotton.

Peel off the Bondaweb from the back of the individual leaves and place them glue side down on to the interfaced side of the other coloured silk.  Iron in place.

Cut carefully around the shapes which are nice and firm and can be shaped a little bit due to the layers of silk, interfacing and glue.

They are raw edge and will be 3D when attached to the quilt.  I will sew them on along the middle vein and they will lift a little to show the different colour underneath.

Yesterday I tried out a method for making the flowers which will also be 3D.  They are made by hand and will have to be attached last of all.


This pink Myrtle flower is the image I am trying to copy.

I am using circles for the petals which are folded in half and then gathered along the raw edge.

The flower pictured has five petals, a centre and some stamens. Here you see the five petals joined together after gathering tightly.

For the centre I am using a white circle of silk which will be sewn up as a Suffolk Puff.

The method I tried out yesterday was to sew in some stamens, as can be seen in the photo. These were bought from Hobbycraft some time ago and are stiff enough to stand up realistically from the centre.  However the fragile nature of the design will mean they have to be sewn on to the quilt when everything else is finished.

The next step is to make the stems and these will be narrow strips of bias cut silk, sewn into a tube on the machine.  Once I know where I want to place them they will be tacked and then stitched to the quilt by machine.

To be continued ....