Learn Beginning Landscape Quilting Simplistically with Nancy Zieman

Learn landscape quilting using this simplistic approach & easy techniques.

Nancy and her quilting mentor Natalie Sewell streamline the landscape quilting process using a beginner’s perspective.

Learn to use inspirational photos, choose fabric, and master messy & fussy cutting techniques.

Create trees easily with raw-edge appliqué techniques & give them dimension with fabric markers or oil pastels.

Learn to create a garden scene in fabric with this easy landscape quilting process.

Natalie Sewell, landscape quilt artist & Nancy create beautiful foliage, groundcover and floral accents in their landscape quilt designs—learn the easy process in this program.

Nancy & Natalie guide you in choosing fabric, cutting, clustering, highlighting, adding dimension for beautiful detail in your quilt garden

Rest in Heaven Nancy Zieman, your Legacy continues as you have left a mark on this world that we can never forget!

Spontaneous landscape quilting techniques are the secret to creating picturesque scenes.

Nancy & Natalie Sewell have fine-tuned the process of landscape quilting.

You’ll learn to cut blooms, accents, & mountains creatively & enhance them easily with fabric, paint, or markers.

Then, give life to your designs as you stipple, following the movement of the fabric with easy tips from Natalie & Nancy.

Enjoy watching Sewing with Nancy as she delivers step-by-step how-to video tutorials that encompass sewing, quilting, machine embroidery techniques, and much more!

Landscape quilting is not a new topic on sewing with Nancy it’s a technique that always pequs great interest many of you have embraced this art quilt idea and created beauty of nature for yourself others have voiced a hesitancy to begin taking the challenge to further streamline the process I’ve invited my

Quilting buddy Natalie Su to return and we’re going to present a series on landscape quilting from a beginner’s perspective welcome back Natalie oh it’s nice to be here Nancy and I think we have simplified the process for beginners uh first we’ll show you how to create a simple fall scene my quilt

October evening features dramatic trees and simple foliage instead of showing you how to make this specific design we’ll show you how to easily create trees with my raw Edge applique technique beginning landscape quilting that’s what’s next done sewing with Nancy for your first landscape quilting

Project you only have to work with a few Fabrics Natalie October evening has only four Fabrics in here right includ and that includes the background it’s a very simple scene great for beginners because you learn all the techniques of landscape quilting without a very complicated scene there’s no ground

Cover and uh we found these wonderful trees we used the photo for inspiration but we left the photo behind very soon because we did find some of these wonderful leaves of course Much More Much close up than the photo now you saw from the inspirational photo

That we use that it had a day it was taken during the day I took the photo I know but Natalie did it beautifully in the evening scene and you can change your scene just because of the Fabrics you use for the background there are so many choices there are wonderful

Boutiques that make good backgrounds and those are readily available everywhere here this is a boutique I’m sorry got that mixed up and then there are these wonderful hand dyes that are now more e more easily easy to find uh and more people are dying Fabric and it’s a great

It’s a great background the dappling of light really does half the work for you yes it does it does now the trees we concentrating on a dark color tree and we just usually don’t use one fabric for trees often it’s very nice to used make the shading uh by using lots of

Different Tech uh colors on the tree trunk these are some choices of tree fabric that are wonderful if you cut them the right way speaking of cutting we’re using raw Edge applique and Natalie’s going to show you a messy cutting technique yes never use a rotary cutter in when you’re making a landscape

Quilt because it’s too straight and everything will look like a telephone pole so what I like like to do is cut uh with just the scissors and starting with a sort of fat bottom and working my way up to so I I’m not careful because trees

Are have a lot of irregularities in them they have a lot of character yes they do and uh this is easy to do and fun and you just have to give yourself permission that you can cut poorly yes messy cutting is the key to landscape quilting here’s here’s a tree

That it looks like a mess but when we get it on the scene it will look just fine a glue stick paper glue stick is the key next to pin not literally but baste it down into place and Natalie you have your basting station next to the table and

You’re going to glue the back right I’m going to start with uh one of these trees that I’ve messy cut and I’m going to glue the back now on a boutique like this the back and the front are exactly the same so it doesn’t matter which side

And I have a glue stick right here glue sticks will not gum up your needle we get asked that question all the time they won’t it dries clear think of it as a stabilizer it’s just fine it’s the kind of glue stick you can buy at a drugstore or Office Supply fly

Store it’s just a paper glue stick and while Natalie’s gluing I’m just going to roughly put up some tree trunks Natalie I don’t know if I’m following your design but oh it doesn’t really matter we can convey the idea easily and it’s nice to put a little wiggle in the tree

Sure you know just a little bit of a little gnarly yeah sometimes I do admit that I pin it up just to make sure I like what I’m doing or where I have it positioned cuz I don’t have any glue here but then go back and do some gluing right after I

Get it down now these trees as you can see have darker area so we used a darker fabric um and cut little and cut little slivers to shade the tree and I’ll put these on here okay you do that we’re going to do some tag teeming as Natalie is doing some positioning to

Give it shading to give it depth I’m going to cut this great leaf fabric that Natalie found and it’s it’s a little bit larger than maybe the leaves need to be so you can cut the leaves down make them smaller this is raw Edge we’re going to eventually in the third program this

Series show how we stitch this down right now this is the designing process and you can stitch these down much or we’ll stitch them down but right now we’ll just position them and Natalie you’re getting some shape there that’s looking quite interesting oh good and I’m going to Cluster Some Leaves we

Don’t have a branch there yet but we we’d add a branch and cluster some leaves down let’s put a branch in there okay good and you can kind of see how this process you’re building the way you see it and there we go I’m just going to

Stick some on here we’re we’re you don’t want to have evenly spread it out because there we have a Falling Leaf we have another Falling Leaf it’s almost fall yeah they’re falling down well as we’re working on this we’d like to show you two other images that we’ve created

Or Natalie’s created one called windy right Wendy’s a very simple quilt I fell in love with the with the fabric and gorgeous leaves and I simply put them on uh I just put them on wonderful background Fabric and that was a landscape quilt and your Oak design

Really stately tree strong with a lot of shading and different colors of fabric yeah was fun to make the tree trunk I have a lot of oak trees around my house and they were my model so you get a hint of what we’re doing we’re applying gluing down the fabric adding some

Shading with the fabric Natalie added a branch we’ll show you later how to shade the branches cluster some leaves but you can see from a very short time period how you can create a beginner landscape quilt when you’d like to create a landscape featuring White Birch or aspirin trees like Natalie’s design old

Friends some of the same designing principles apply along with a few new tricks in this design we’ll detail how to create depth and shape and also how to improvise when you can’t find the exact Leaf fabric you’d like now Natalie this is a work in process progress you haven’t stippled it

Yet but oh the designing is perfect and the white trees the Birch scene summer scene is impressionistic and inviting thank you Nancy it was a fun one to do and I found wonderful Birch Fabrics here show them yeah it doesn’t say Birch fabric on the bolt but on the Salvage

But wow it’s meant to be storm but if you cut it you can see how easily it can look like a birch now there are other options that you can choose right remember though when you’re using Birch Fabrics you have to make horizontal lines so make sure you cut this

Direction not that direction so that the little lines that are in the birch trees now this actually is supposed to be snow fabric I think I we use this for snow a lot but it also would make a nice Birch if you if you look carefully at what the

Little lines show you so you don’t have to get things exact it doesn’t have to we’re not techically correct in this series we’re just giving the illusion of pretty nature right right and the design is summer we’ve Natalie has chosen a hand dyed fabric in the second program

You’re going to learn about ground cover but we just put some up there for the the look and because here’s our inspirational scene right two trees nice summer day and we’ve made the design much like it with putting two trees down and Natalie branches we’d like to show

Our viewers how you we skinny skinny piece and we’re going to just put it do you want a little glue on there uh yeah that’s a good idea yeah here we’ll just put a little dab of glue usually we do a little bit more but not today so just

Have it go here and run off make sure you’ve got curves and have it it can run right off the fabric there now I think we need to shade our trees we do and shading is really important we’re using markers permanent markers and all available at office

Supply stores yes permanent make sure it so it doesn’t run and we we’re going to to make believe like the Sun and light is coming from Natalie’s side of the quilt so we’ll shading on dark on on this side right Natalie right right and it makes a huge

Difference of it adds such depth and dimension when you do some shading few lines are good too it rounds it off right away and I’m just going to darken this leaf or this Branch here to show that it’s a little garly there yes yes excellent and we want to Define between the trees

Here it doesn’t take much to and we’re going give some shape I think we’re going to go on the bottom of the branch yes to shade it next time I’ll glue that down a little bit better and we’re going to stitch this down later on don’t get me

Wrong but in this temporary time period we’re just going to hold it down like that and then we have black and we also have some gray sometimes if you want a little bit more gray gray you can use a silver permanent pen but then the magic happens when you do some drawing drawing

Of the fine leaves and now this is a little scary for beginners but let me show you how easy it is you take your pen in your hand I use the black first and you wiggle it just give it a wiggle and start br branching out Natalie’s branches always

Look better than mine but I’m working on [Laughter] it and then you can highlight them to give them depth with the silver pen on top isn’t that right Natalie yes that gives a lot of definition these little markers here are just wonderful for making the branch look realistic that’s the magic of beginning

Landscape quilting now for an impressionist impressionistic leaves Natalie chose a boutique Fabric and then this yellow fabric oh my goodness not your normal landscape quilting fabric nice cluster of bananas and while n Natalie is cutting that I’m just going to quickly glue up some shapes and you use bananas because

Of the shaping or the shading I the shading is wonderful uhhuh and so I just cut a leaf and going to stick it right here and you just if you if we look back at the original you can kind of see how she’s clustered these they’re not evenly

Dispersed added a few lines through the leaves to get them more realistic it’s just playing with fabric playing with markers tremendous fun yeah it is we we have some showcases to show you the first day of summer features one big tree as a focal Point did a lot of shading on this with

Gray and black markers and then I also did a scene called Blue Birches that Fabrics birch trees aren’t always blue but it’s a win it depends on the light and that that makes a tree blue so we’ve taught you some just some basic principles of shading with markers

Drawing in branches you can cut fabric that isn’t meant to be leaves to resemble leaves base them down and you have the beginning of a great design winter landscape scenes pose new design opportunities river birch trees in the snow by Natalie showcases the stark contrast between snow and trees we

Think you’ll be slightly surprised to learn all the fabric options when your inspiration comes from snow covered ground we’d like to show you landscape scenes in various stages and Natalie You’ finished designing this but it hasn’t been stippled or layered right and the scene or the inspiration

Came from a snapshot after a winter stormy day and here you can see some river birch trees and how the the snow drifts up at the trunk at the base and you will show our viewers how to do the same but first let’s just talk about tree fabric because you’re not going to

Go to the fabric store and say where is your tree fabric right CU you’re you’re not going to find what you need and this is what you found and it is exactly what you needed and I didn’t know that when I bought it I just thought it was an interesting piece but

When you look at it carefully and put your hands like this you can see that tree emerges and there could be various shapes of trees right right right so that was a real find and then I just found this the other day what a nice oak

Tree this will make if you can see my hands going the bark is so much like an oak that light and dark the the dapple shading and you can use the this fabric for the two distant trees right and this really is a natural

I I won’t need to shade this much at all as you can see from the original it’s it makes a perfect tree and I use these to show a little distance we should say something about the about the snow yes uh this is a hand dye and notice that it isn’t white it’s

Got a lot of shading of uh light and dark and blue snow which is really more realistic and it but it does read as winter there’s no doubt about that right we thought we was important to do shading again because we just gave you a taste of it and it’s so crucial in

Beginning landscape quilting or Advanced landscape quilting as far as that goes and the light we’re going to have the light come from your side Natalie good okay light for my side so we’re going to shade this side with we’re using black markers the kind you buy at an

Office supply store they’re permanent so you don’t have to worry about yeah once they’re on they’re on forever and then you know we can do some lines like ny’s doing right there the fabric whoops the fabric helps do that but we can add a little

More and the shading this is a lot of fun I hate to say this boy it’s a I just some people relax by reading ey shade trees shading trees is it’s very scary I’ve been teaching for a long time and I know that shading is probably the scariest thing for beginners but look

How easy it is now it’s winter so in our scene we had I think we had in our scene some snow gathering in the Crux of the elbow of the branches so and I was careful not to find a snow that with Snow White this has lots of shading in

It so what we’re going to do is simply put little piece right here and we glued this down I have to say but we’re just kind of putting it in there yeah we do glue but you can see the the look there and then we’ll quickly do some drawing

I’ll do the how about I do the um brush and you do the background trees now okay it’s just like the branches good only we will make it look like the shrubber that is just kind of left Barren and here we’re going to have distant trees I’m using a little bit of a

Silver and then I’m going to use the black and at home I take a little bit more time on this but you get the concept you can just draw right on this area now we have two more scenes winter scenes to share with you and the first

One is a joint project that we did together and Natalie found the snapshot or this photo in a newspaper right right three basic trees a man walking away and then we created January and we did it in 45 minutes because it is such a simple tree simple scene I couldn’t make the

Man but that’s that’s dick Natalie’s husband walking away and I think it’s just a great scene and the fabric it makes you shiver doesn’t it now the inspiration that you see next is from Summer and it’s a stately tree yes I had a lot of fun U painting and designing

And uh marking up that tree but you made it not in a summer scene but in 10 below yes yes and it is a very cold cold looking scene as we all know from experiencing winter in Wisconsin yes so you can take elements from one inspiration put it on a winter

Background you did that Natalie so you didn’t have to put so much background folage in allowed me to focus on the tree winter is one of the simplest scenes in a landscape scene to design so today in this program we’ve done a white tree white and winter and fall giving you the

Basics of landscape quilting two of my favorite hobbies are sewing and gardening almost 20 years ago was introduced to a quilting technique that combined both avocations please welcome Natalie Su a good friend and almost the nationally known landscape quilting artist Natalie we’ve done programs before on landscape quilting

But this time we’re really going down to the very Basics the simplest of all absolutely we’re just doing the beginning elements of landscape quilting and a great place to start is with a close-up Garden scene my design summer flowers is what we’ll use as an example

On how to choose fabric messy and fussy cut as well as design with raw Edge applique beginning landscape quilting that’s what’s next next on sewing with Nancy when you’re beginning your landscape quilting Journey choosing Fabrics or knowing how to choose fabric sometimes is can be a stumbling block

We’d like to share with you how we approach that that attempt but also how we work with a pattern or an inspirational photo that’s right Nancy the photo seemed to me just ideal for teaching beginning landscape quilting it had no color however and the background was just modeled just modeled yes so

When you look at this finished quilt with a background fabric it’s a hand dyed fabric right and if you missed our first episode you can go to Nancy zman.com and watch it online to see a little bit more information on Fabrics we use but you can buy it hand dyed or

Commercial boutiques would work too just so they’re modeled and they have some they give a shape variety of Shades shapes Shades and a little bit of color so we have our fabric placed on our background but then as far as choosing Leaf Fabrics or foliage Fabrics round cover you have an assortment there

Natalie I do and these are very easy to find in fabric stores and the more the merrier because all greens seem to go together in nature so we’ve got a collection here that we’ve cut out messy cutting and messy cutting if you haven’t tried messy cutting before watch the pro

Cut fabric poorly yes you have to be really messy with it that’s why we call it messy cutting and so what I’m going to do is just cut very badly and try not to look where I’m going and then you get something that looks like a shrub and this shape

Doesn’t have any lollipop or ice cream cone shapes you want it irregular yeah there’s nothing really round in foliage and Natalie has pre-cut some of the Fabrics as you can see that we have scattered here and we also have some pre-cut fabrics for the for the flowers

I wanted to show you the floral Fabrics that we have you you don’t need a lot of yardage for this you just need a small amount just to messy cut out some sections and in this floral print we have some really big ones but then the

Little itty bitty areas are what we used for some ground cover just a hint of fabric as you get used to looking at Fabrics you get used to looking for little tiny details like that now glue stick is the key you’re going to use to put on the back of your fabric fabric

Not a paper glue stick not a fabric glue stick paper and roughly add a little glue stick just to temporarily hold it in place it will not gum up your needle trust me yes and Natalie’s going to glue one piece and put it up and then we’re

Going to create the scene and go ahead let me show you how we glue uh it’s just simply opening the tube and sticking the glue this is just a as Nancy said just a temporary measure and that’s enough to start your seam and now we’re going together we’re

Going to build this F this foliage this ground cover and I’m going to take some of these pieces you really can’t go wrong with putting the fabric or cutting the fabric because if it looks poorly it’s probably what you want yeah and you can see that

Uh messing it up by putting foliage in different not trying not to make it a nice arrangement but a very irregular if you just had one one fabric it would be flat it wouldn’t have Dimension so that’s why we try to choose Fabrics that have kind of the same scale

The same size leaves so that they look proportionate for the design and share with some friends they may have some Fabrics at at in their fabric stash that look appropriate and I’m just going the other the other wonderful thing about this is how little fabric you really need for landscape

Clothing now some of our uh flowers are just going to be tucked in here because in many flower gardens you don’t you have more foliage than you have flowers yes and these are our only fussy cut uh leaves here and these were cut out of this Fabric and they will

Go here so they this is these tall flowers and this is not botanically correct we don’t really know what these are but they look right don’t they Natalie they look right to me and we don’t worry about accuracy in Botanical terms now this would all be glued down

But you can start to see how the depth of the fabric by layering it creates interesting designs and a great beginner project now Natalie you’ve created another scene called the meadow the meadow is this time has a blue background right a a more like sky and the flowers are big the whole scale

Is quite different notice though that the foliage is the same foliage that we’re using here but using it in a big form and a larger scale the poppies are kind of fun to work with right and then I made a scene called iris is in my garden again little impressionistic

Looking lots of foliage this is one of my first landscape quilts and it I mean I do it differently now but it’s it’s kind of a beginner great beginner project a great beginning quilt so as you’re working on this at home after you’ve decided on your fabric you

Positioned it down then you just glue it into place glue it down we’ll show you in our third program of the series how to base and how to do the quilting and putting it together but a garden scene a great place for beginner landscape Quilters to get their feet

Wet I’m certain your eye focuses on the dancing Maple in Natalie’s quilt by the same name the Lively and spirited tree is the star of the design yet without the interesting ground cover the depth and dimension in the quilt would not be as impactful if your inspiration photo

Features ground cover we’d like to share with you the tricks of choosing Fabric and designing that all-important landscape quilt element well here’s the quilt and it’s glory and fun part of it and Natalie you had an inspiration for this quilt yes I did it was a tree near my house in full

Color in the early fall a Japanese maple and it was photographed just just with a cement driveway so we took Liberties and I just created a new dimension we don’t let the photo be the boss of us it’s the inspiration as we reference that in the first program of the series we talked

About trees so you can reference that again if to watch that again how that’s working out but beginner Quilters often have a difficult time choosing fabrics for the ground cover right ground cover is very intimidating when you’re first beginning so I like to remind Quilters that you can’t really use too

Many pieces of ground cover the important thing however is scale and you need to make sure that the scale you don’t want huge leaves you want the leaves to be comparable in ground cover and so we’ve just given you an example of four fabric that really work well as

Ground cover now as we kind of move up the quilt we’ll talk about trees a little bit later but look at the scale of the leaves and the trees I mean obviously distant ground cover you see the leaves it’s scale that’s important and you may need a lot of fabrics we

Give you permission to buy a lot of fabrics but you don’t need a lot of yardage of each no really if you a half a yard of each fabric would be more than enough for many quotes so we have the trees glued to the background Fabric and

We’d like to share with you after messy cutting the edges now you’d glue each piece and that’s F we’re just going to save some time but we we to give the depth we’re going to put this Nat I hope these stick up here long enough for us to show

Them and you can see how we’ve kind of hiding some of those Fabrics there we go and if you just use one fabric it’s going to be be flat it’s two-dimensional but Natalie is achieving great depth by the fussy cutting and we’re dropping leaves on the floor or ground cover here

But let’s look at yeah great how that does some shaping and the different colors give the shadow effect whop that one truly needs to be glued down let’s try a pin for now and just notice how it’s shaped but in the quilt we have the red leaves which will talk about in a

Minute but in that ground cover Natalie you have some highlights I do I thought well it’s the red maple it’s going to be losing a few leaves so what I did was simply take a red oil pastel and make little red marks it it’s also nice to

Have the color red appear again in the ground cover now I think we should talk about permanent markers you buy it at office school supply store oil p pastels where you buy at an art store they work great for landscape they do you don’t need to go you don’t need to have artist

Materials office supply stores work beautifully we we you added Natalie this great looking sapling or or landscape or Japanese maple excuse me and this is the fabric you chose right for the leaves and we talked a lot about messy cutting but this had some fussy cutting in it right and by fussy cutting

We mean following along the lines of the little patterns inside you know and instead of going Wiggly and messy we’re we’re really following the lines and uh it’s very tedious but if you’re a quilter tedium is good but then to get depth Natalie cut the leaves down to

Make the smaller scale so that everything wasn’t the the same size and these look like they’re in the distance which is the effect I wanted so we’re just giving you kind of tidbits design in design tricks this when working with landscape quilting in this third program

We’ll show you how to stitch these down and to do the quilting but this is how you achieve some of the looks or pull from the inspiration that you may start with now here’s an inspirational photo of of the scene Natalie calls dogwood this is the starting point and then this

Is your quilt lovely Natalie oh thank you Nancy this again look at the little white blossoms again very tedious but a lot of fun and the ground cover a variety of fabrics so that the the trees are showcased in you don’t really concentrate on it but it makes the scene look so

Impressive I use this inspirational photo to create my design it the trees aren’t a normal color it’s kind of have a lot of moss on it so here’s my interpretation of that photograph I call it if trees were teal crazy colorations but they look somewhat realistic they look wonderful

They look wonderful and often trees look that way and the ground cover again helps accentuate and finish the design I’m certain by now you realize you’re learning to use fabric as paint and scissors as your paintbrush to capture nature in a wall hanging Natalie’s Autumn Birches the design combines many techniques we’ve already

Explained with the exception of the background tree foliage next learn the importance of the scale of fabric prints and the also the importance of really bad messy cutting to give the impression of distant trees we’re having many constant themes through this program and in this Autumn Birch scene you have foreground ground

Cover which we’ve already have in our design that you’ll see but then also we have worked with trees and this background foliage it is critical that that’s a technique that you learn how to create and here’s your fabric Natalie yeah these are some of the foliage uh

Fabrics that we’ve used you can there’s so many available uh and so we just brought three here but these if they’re cut messy they really work very well as distant folage we talked about the importance of messy cutting you know the edges are really ragged and you just wo

Your scissors in and out let me do one for you please and the often when I do this sometimes I end up recutting just to make sure the edges are Jagged enough see how messy I’m making it in fact sometimes I’m actually even ripping the fabric a little

Bit now we will be tacking this fabric down you’ll learn this in the third program we’ll be doing some sewing details but this is all on design today right and we’re going to put the foliage in before the trees in this case because I’ve deliberately made the trees the

Foreground so we’re going to just place the foliage this is easy easy work and you would of course glue this we’re we’re spending or saving a little time by just letting it be tacky right now T tack to the background fabric it it foliage in the distance comes down

Further we can get it up a little bit higher and with that interesting background that dark background now we didn’t show this Natalie but I think we should take a little pause right now to show the inspiration fabric that we used or the inspiration photo right because

You can kind of see what we just created now is in the scene in the distance there’s very little leaves or they’re modeled you can’t see they’re very small right and that’s that’s what we’ve created here so you’re using that photo just as a guideline right and we often

Jump off and leave the photo in the dust when we making a quilt Natalie has taken down the tree trunks that we pre-cut this is the fabric that we use the two pieces the dark fabric for the very distant trees and then there are kind of mid- rain trees and then the closest

Trees are made from the Birch fabric the wrong side and what normally would be the right side yeah this is the right side and this is the other right side yeah so here’s again poorly cut trees but they look more realistic than if you used a ruler you wouldn’t we wouldn’t want to

Use a rotary cutter first we’ll do the shaping and show you how we like to use some trees now again we glue these down I was hesitant as a beginner landscape quilter to glue it it’s the only way to go about it but for time sake

We’re let me tell you that Nancy did pin every single piece the pins all stuck together it didn’t work it didn’t work at all on the bottom of the tree to make it look more realistic you can either tuck it behind some messy cut foliage as

I have here or if you’d like you can cut kind of a jagged bottom yeah so that it looks a little bit more realistic now I’m going to put up some birch trees and put some this is a little long but would cut it sure sure so you can see how you

Know the trees are starting to get some foliage back there you’d need more you’d need more foliage but picking up some hints from our first program we’re going to do a little shading and whether dark marker or silver marker you can add some shading we we detailed that a lot in

That program but you get the idea of wow just with a little very little goes a long way in shading these are kind of Happy Trees happy little trees yes they are and even on the light tree we want to show that it it that it’s got shading

Because look at how the dimension changes when you darken one Edge now as we oh it’s just amazing what shape that gives and we look at Natalie’s Autumn Birches and you can see the great shading we drew in or Natalie drw some distant distant branches and it’s just

Charming now let’s take a look at two other Inspirations first of all we have September and here’s the inspiration photo and then your quilt your grand quilt thank you the again you know this is for Quilters cutting out each little gold leaf was was quite a challenge but

I found it fun and you will too I created a scene called horican Marsh modeled after a marer where I live and the distant trees I have many of the same Fabrics I used in the foreground but Those Distant trees give depth and shape so during the second program we

Have worked with a flower bed worked with ground cover also tree foliage using any of the same principles gluing the fabric down and next time we’ll show you some stitching techniques landscape quilting breaks many rules it’s okay to cut inaccurately in fact it’s recommended glue sticks are

Used instead of pins and the pattern isn’t a pattern at all just a photo Natalie Su my good friend taught me landscape quilting many years ago and I haven’t stopped since and she’s back to give simple techniques for beginning landscape Quilters welcome back Natalie thank you Nancy I’m glad to be here I’ve

Made hundreds of quilts over the years and in the process I’ve learned to fine tune the the the whole technique in this series we’re focusing on specific elements within scenes in the quilt Prairie which Nancy made you’ll see distant and close-up cone flowers designing a scene like this might seem

Daunting yet you’ll soon learn how you two can become the landscape quilter beginning landscape quilting that’s what’s next on sewing with Nancy the element that Natalie and I are going to detail next is the scale of flowers and how to add floral designs to your scene the Prairie with cone flowers and

And lots of weeds and grasses uh was inspired by this photo that you now see and just a quick snapshot gave me the idea to make a quilt this way now Natalie in the first two programs of the series we went through ground cover and trees so so we’re not going to go

Through the ground cover if you’d like to watch the first two episodes go online at Nancy zon.com and watch them but let’s show our viewers some of the Fabrics that we use these are some of the Fabrics Nancy used for ground cover and as you can see they are small scale

Because that’s what uh she needed for the scene and notice as she gets Tire in the scene she uses a little tiny bit of this in order to create distance so that you can see the small further away the smaller closer to at the bottom of the

Quilt then we used larger Leaf prints so it’s just we reviewed that in the first two series but the flowers we don’t always use floral prints because you can’t always find them so often we have to adapt and adjust flowers such as these in order to make these yeah tulips

Started out but then cone flowers they became and it’s you may seem a little odd but if you like to cut you are in for a surprise because I’m just going to show you the progression I cut out some of these open tulips this is the design

That I cut out and here’s the open tulip I cut off the top because the cone flower has the seed section I cut it into petals this is some creative cutting and then if you’d like to add it some highlight I used you can add some

Extra purple now I must say in the original design I used a pink color but uh I didn’t have as much of that love to make the samples and Natalie I’m just kind of showing everyone that you can add some creative touches here and some highlights and it

Looks kind of like it now we can put some of these up here just to show how we go about it Natalie you want to glue that for us I’m going to glue these already cut flowers and if you missed our first program we’re using paper glue it’s okay

Glue stick just like you would buy for your children or grandchildren before they go to school nice thing about glue is that you can pull things off without damaging them if you change your mind and I’m going to cut narrower or down cut down some of the flower leaves or petals to

Make some of those distant flowers and that’s what’s really important you can use the same coloration the same print and then I’m put a dot up here and it may not look like a cone flower to you but it will read that way so I’m going to make little small little

Sections and just to give you a idea of how that was created the stems were cut from a boutique Fabric and you can see the diagonal we just Natalie taught me this great trip just cut narrow strips of the fabric and I’m going to just add a

Little glue we’ll show you later on how to tack this down permanently but Natalie it’s really not difficult to add add some curve to it what’s nice when you cut on the bias is that you can get a nice curve and you can kind of see crudely how we’re

Starting this but this is how you work at it if we take one more look at our scene you’ll see a a variety of sizes of these flowers and it’s all just by cutting down right cutting down coloring a little and you have any kind of flower

You’d like in this next scene is sunflowers I was able to find three different sizes of sunflowers using the same concept sunflowers along a fence and make that’s one of my earlier scenes but now we have a beautiful window scene Natalie uh a beautiful window scene that was actually

My very first flower scene and I didn’t really know what I was doing so I had 50 different kinds of flowers pasted on here and it was too much um so I realized that I would have to take them off and add more leaves it’s really important that you have one flow for

Every 20 leaves um now some of the uh Fabrics I’ve used not necessarily in here but in lots of flower quilts come from Fabrics that are quite dull like these with magic markers you can create any kind of color you want by overc coloring and overpainting just simply by

Using a marker and you can get a wonderful effect look at this very dull fabric here very boring but the shapes of the Tulips are really really nice and by coloring it we have created lots of different wonderful shapes add a little black in the center and you

Have some a rem very nice little poppies um for example this is and then you can just cut them out realistically and this is a good example let’s put it right here so you can see this so yeah you just fussy cut around the edges or

You could cut it down making it smaller if you wanted to right it could be quite small it’s hard to give you all the ideas but what we want to express is that you can change the sh sh shape can say that right shape and size of the

Flower just by cutting coloring and adding it to your scene so you have lots of flexibility a trip to Rocky Mountain National Park was the inspiration for this landscape design designing a mountain quilt is a less on how to recreate great distance with fabric I used handdyed Fabrics permanent markers

And oil pastels to create the Majestic mountains Natalie we have couple of things going on in this scene right we’ve already talked about ground cover in previous programs and notice that the ground cover is a very small scale and now these wonderful mountains that are I think just wonderful Nancy well thank

You and the fabric um that we’re going to show you is made with a variety of it’s hand dyed so it has light and dark and I chose this because of the inspiration and here’s a what I Ed for the inspiration actually it came from a

Guide sheet or guide book when I went into the Rocky Mountain National Park then this kind of the second portion of this design has some Aspen trees in it and to get the aspen trees which are native and indigenous to this area I used another Snapshot from that

Trip so I combined two snapshots now I have to be honest I use this from the guide book or the the paper that you get when you get into the park and you’re not going to copy things it’s exactly from another artist but it’s your mountains are mountains and this was a

Snapshot it was a it’s a wonderful snapshot and it helped you guide it it did your oil pastels and your markers uh when you did the shading and the shading makes the difference in the world exactly and that’s what we’re going to spend some time on during this segment

Is using markers and oil pastels and when we are working on our landscape designs we usually pin or tape our our in Inspiration right close by and we’re going to start with permanent markers to do some of the shading of The Valleys these dark stripes in the scene and and

Good thing with mountains and trees you don’t have to really have something can’t really make a mistake might maybe get a little bit more of a Darkness here now in the first two shows of course we did the we did the foreground and we did trees so we’re not

Going to go over that now yeah you can see can you kind of see how that’s making a difference already getting it some depth I’m looking at some of these mountains here good job Natalie I think I’m going into your territory you just do that mm give me give me a little

Shape of the mount mountain in the front yeah make sure you have your seam glued down because that will help it when you as you are working on it and now you can use gray or white oil pastels to make some of the snow and the oil pastels are

Found at an art store you taught me about art supply store or they’re available able from various lots of different companies online and uh they’re wonderful tools which we didn’t discover until we were had done landscape quilting for about six or seven years so gray and white and and

It’s just snow you know snow on the Mountaintop and since the fabric has some white here already even though my inspiration doesn’t I’m going to add some snow up here and here too in the distant mountain and the distant Mountain that Natalie is working on is a lighter Boutique because the distance is

Obviously lighter than what’s closer to you so Natalie as you’re working on this I’m going to tell our viewers about two other Inspirations that we had for quilts and the first one is called mount reneer on a clear day and this is one of my first mountain scenes that I created

And instead of using oil pastels I used a lighter colortique fabric for the mountains and so you can use either or right and then peaceful doesn’t have a lot of going on in it but it’s a lot of greens and blues but again it’s from Rocky Mountain

National Park so I must have I must have enjoyed that trip he he really did so I think you can see from the process we’ve gone through various Design Elements trees flowers distant leaves so many other things and then rocks are in this design we had Natalie

And her fabric stash had this great Rock fabric which from distant to closeup rocks from one fabric it’s all in finding the right fabric we put it together now Natalie we’re going to show our viewers how to take the design Bas it down and then do the stippling quilting to put it all

Together after designing your lscape quilt top you’re going to base down the layers then layer the quilt and do stippling and Natalie and I were going to show this to you just giving you a brief preview of what’s to come the stippling is the overall stitching it’s

Done with clear thread nly and the sky have some kind of overall Stitch but in the mountains I have not sewn some areas and that gives a valley look or this area has not been sewn down and it helps with the dimension on the trees you taught me this great

Tip and that is not to stitch in the interior of the trees right that sort of gives a little depth to the scam on the reverse side you can almost see where I’ve been just or what the design is perhaps just by the stippling Edge or this the stippling design it’s random

It’s kind of a fun part but before we go on to this I’m just going to tell you how to set up your sewing machine importantly you need clear monofilament thread in the needle and thread that matches your backing Fabric in the bottom put on a foot for free motion stitching

It rises and you’ll see this with Natalie rises above the fabric it it doesn’t go close to the fabric it gives you a little space so that you can move it around you’ll have a straight Stitch and the most important thing is to lower the feed dogs cover them or lower them

They the little biting mechanism is not here and I have used a needle a sharp needle about a size 80 is you don’t need it much larger than that for the stitching first Nelly we’re going to anchor down base down all those cut Edge pieces right now these are just glued

And by sewing it down I hold it in place so that later I can actually do the stippling so I’m going to just go to the outlines of just do the outlines of the tree trunk the outlines of the branches coming back down just making Mak sure everything’s in place and

You’re holding the fabric rather taut because we don’t have a feed dog here right so I have to hold it in place but following the lines it’s quite simple following the lines of the tree trunk of course I don’t need to sew down anything that I’ve drawn so I’m really

Just sewing down these major trees and just doing tacking the whole exactly whole thing just tack it down then you’re going to press your fabric very flat right and square it up right if you want to add borders then that would be the time to add borders we we

Can have that in the reference material that accompanies today’s program but today we’re doing it Without Borders right and then comes the layering quilts always have three layers they do this is where you go back to some very traditional methods of quilt making you want to make make sure that

You’ve found a fabric uh for a backing that is the same intensity as the one in front for example you wouldn’t want to use a black background fabric because it would show through so uh We’ve chosen a background fabric a backing fabric that’s very similar to the front so that

It nothing will show through and um I like to use masking tape to hold my background fabric flat my backing fabric flat then layer always leave two two to three Ines on each side so that you’ve got room uh to sew and then then we pin

We about a fist width apart yes and I use we just use regular dry cleaner pins we’re going to share samples here Natalie okay okay I’ll take this one and you can take the other there there we go and Natalie’s going to then do the free motion stitching following the design of

The fabric following the design of the quilt and old friends was the name of this quilt that we worked with in the first program of the series and here it is and I’m going to start it’s layered and I’m going to start the actual machine stippling it’s going to take several

Kinds of stitches I’m going to do the grass up and down I’m going to go along the sides of the trees and not into the tree trunk and the leaves I’m going to actually make uh little lines in but the background is going to be stippled and

That’s what I’m going to show you right now okay and the needle down and then so I’m using little tiny swirls that’s my signature stippling each person develops a style of their own and mine are like little puzzle pieces you get a rhythm you move the fabric

Slowly you Stitch notice I’m gripping it with my left hand I’m a lefty so you might want to reverse how you do this and then you’re going to outline the tree trunks yep I’m making my way over there right now this is really fun and can be very

Relaxing once you get your rhythm going up the Branch and now I’ll show you a leaf down the middle along on the sides onto the next Leaf it’s rhythmic and that’s how we finish the stippling of the quilt and during this series we’ve given you many design element ideas and we finish it up

With how to layer and then how to do the stitching start with a small project right Natalie exactly and a simple one don’t try maybe mount Mountain aren’t your first quilt true that’s why we ended with the mountains but a tree as we did with the October evening thank

You again for being my guest it’s my favorite topic to teach oh and so much fun teaching it with you and I hope you’ll enjoy landscape quilting