Fabric Art - flowers

For the past three years I have been exhibiting work at the Japanese Garden with the group, "High Fiber Diet". It is a beautiful venue and we always sell quite a few pieces. Since it is a garden setting I like to make at least one "flower" piece.
This year's flower piece was the foxglove at left. It was the image that was used on the postcard that advertised the show. The year before I made a hydrangea piece.

Since posting some of my small quilts, I have gotten some questions about how I get the black outlines in my work. You can see that these two flower pieces use the same technique. The "black" line is usually not really black, but a very dark blue, gray or brown. I fuse the fabrics for the main subjects onto my dark fabric first, letting some of it show through as "lines" between the pieces of fabric. I like the way these lines are varied in width and nearly disappear altogether in some places. It is the closest approximation to a hand-drawn line I have gotten with fabric. After all the pieces are fused onto the dark background, I cut around the whole thing, leaving a bit of dark line all the way around and then fuse the dark background fabric to the background. You may think all that fusing makes it all very stiff and hard to stitch through, but I am actually only fusing the edges of the fabrics and the details of how I do that is a story for another day...