..and the sewing begins..

So now that everything is prepped and ready, the real sewing begins. Time to put everything down on the linen... permanently! The tree trunk is the real foundation of the piece, and it's the biggest, so it goes down first. I pinned the bottom, smaller part of the tree trunk down, and sewed that on first. Eeeee! And then it's on to the main part of the tree trunk. (and yes, the lettering is all straight except for two letters. Can you tell which ones? my dear hubby ricklet could ;) )





Yikes!! It goes down and can't be undone!



Once the shock wore off, I picked it up to look at it. Wow! It really is a big piece of work! It'll be quite impressive when it's finally hung up. :) I never realized that linen is difficult to work with as a base (satin is much more difficult, though) and had to be careful not to stretch/move the linen as I sewed. This was a recurrent problem throughout all the parts, especially the grass area, so I hope I won't have lost any "data" on the edges or extra crumpling when I sew up all the sides. Next, I did the big puffy cloud, and then began pinning down the branches and leaves.



I first sewed the leaves down individually, then added the branches on top to overlap the leaf edges. Again, not stretching/moving the linen here with cotton pieces pinned down was a task in itself. And as this part of the pattern was in the middle of the whole piece, I had to roll the top and the bottoms and maneuver them around the sewing machine. Too bad sewing machines can't sew multiple directions without moving the cloth.. or can they??



So then it's on to the grasses. I layered 6 grass section in every-other-one fashion so each blade of grass pattern shows sometime. This part was hard because the grass being at the end of the fabric meant I had to roll the rest of the whole piece and turn it around the needle as I sewed each blade of grass. It looks very cute, though, and almost every stitch is perfect. Almost. Then I added the stems for the flowers and the leaves on the biggest flower. And of course, because this was practically the easiest to sew because the stitching is straight, I got my thread caught three times and broke a needle. What gives! Then i pinned and sewed down the flower petals. They came out a little crooked, unfortunately. I had planned to make the flowers appear to be blooming from right to left, but the two bigger blooms look almost the same size. I forgot to take pictures of this whole process (d'oh!) so here's what the finished part looks like.



What's left, you ask? The big red bird and the numbers, of course! :)