Fall Leaves in Fabric

It's fall and that makes me think of leaves. The colors are so amazing and the patterns in them inspire me. I'm particularly fond of the beautiful sea grape leaves here in Florida.

I wanted to create some permanent leaves to sew up for my living room  - that just happens to have a lot of red, orange and purple. My goal was to match these colors. (Those are pillows made from Moroccan Fez hats that my parents brought back for me.)

I made a rough sketch of the idea.

And then drew up my leaves as individual files in Adobe Illustrator. I captured the colors from my pillows to use as the main colors.

After creating the individual leaves, I pasted them into Photoshop using a 54 x 36 150 dpi file so that I could see how many leaves I could get on a yard of fake suede to be printed at Spoonflower.  I added details and texture in Photoshop as well as some cutting lines. Then uploaded the digital file to Spoonflower's web site. (Spoonflower is awesome! It's a totally USA company and it's less expensive to print to fabric than it is to paper! Check it out at www.spoonflower.com.)

My fabric arrived back in less than a week. Unfortunately, I don't always get the colors I want. We all know that issue. My red looks like salmon! But it still worked in the room.

I cut, stitched, turned, quilted and wired to create my leaves.

I still need to find just the right vase and wire them to be tall like my sketch, but I now have some beautiful leaves for year round in my living room.