Applique is my Passion

This is the newest mini quilt in felted applique technique called  Cat Faces in Wool.   It is a good beginner pattern to start needle felting because it is only 15" square.   I had a duplicate design that I made by accident.  It was exactly like one of the birds in the Birds in Wool quilt top I am working on.  So I just made it into a block.  Maybe I'll frame it.  It is 10" high x 11" wide. This is my wool birds quilt so far.  I am going to add two more birds in the corners at the bottom.  The borders and the cornerstones are just pinned on, so they are a bit wonky.  The borders are 6" wide to give you an idea of scale.  The question right now is which border arrangement will I choose? or something totally different?

It is always a challenge to think up a new theme to try for my Felted Applique technique.  I have been kicking around the idea of birds since my Birds and Flowers machine applique pattern is about to run out.  There is so much more I can do with felting than machine applique to make the birds look more real with shading and hand embroidery for the details.  The trick to getting the birds to look like their real buddies out at my bird feeder is getting the beaks the right shape and with sharp points.   The dove at the bottom left still needs legs and feet, but they may go into the border. The crazy quilt stitching where the blocks overlap is my unique take on basic stitches like feather stitch or herringbone stitch and adding more stitches to the “arms” of the base stitch like a chain stitch, or fly, or French knot (I prefer a  Colonial stitch  to French knot because they don't get pulled to the wrong side of the quilt top). On our trip to Manchester NH for the World Qui

  Woolly Fish, the idea of it, is so crazy.  I used the drawings from my Tropical Fish pattern which I first published in 1990 as a cotton quilt.  I've been focusing on wool since 2007 when I found the felting tool.  I have been tweaking my technique ever since.  Behind each critter is a wool applique on top of a hand dyed wool background.  Then I used the felting tool with three barbed needles, to poke wool hand dyed fibers, covering up the applique so you can't see any of it.  The applique serves as a easy way to copy the shape of a design without tracing.  More and more fish appliques were arranged and poked and then the environment was incorporated into the design...a sea fan, sea weeds,  kelp, sea cucumbers that look like tubes, and corals... The backgrounds are composed of 10" hand dyed strips, going sideways.  Some were not the right size for the width of the quilt as it was developing, so I added scraps by felting the backgrounds together and embroider