Paula asked me to have this ready for her last summer (another reason why I don't take in a lot of tops to quilt for people -- my turnaround time is horrendous!), but this was such an unusual quilt, it took a lot of thought for me to get it done. Most of the quilting was done last fall, but then I was totally stumped on how to quilt the background and border. My original thought was to freehand leaves in the "tree" portion of the quilt -- that was the easy part...... For the back, I chose Mettler 100% Cotton Silk Finish thread in color 749.... This is the finished quilt -- because a tree must have a strong root system, I used a lightweight rusty brown thread to give the texture that I wanted in the bottom area of the quilt. The reason for the lightweight thread was that I wanted to emphasize Paula's hand embroidery; a heavier weight thread would have called more attention to itself. Sepia photo transfers of family members were appliqued to the quilt; at left is what it looked like before quilting... ...and now, after quilting around and in the leaves and adding additional quilted leaves to the tree. More leaves and some background stitching; I did go with my original sashiko "cloud" idea. Determining the size of the clouds took up a lot of thinking time. The stencil had three sizes of the same cloud pattern; the label says "Overall Pattern #W1007" and it is from StenSource International. The leaves were stitched in a really pretty Sulky rayon, #1209 Light Avocado. I quilted a little bit inside each of the three birds on the quilt, straight stitched on both sides of the inner border and completed the quilting with a cable variation in the outer border. The cable that I used was from The Stencil Company, #SCO-014-2.5. For both the border and the sashiko background, I used Sulky rayon #1203, Light Weathered Blue. I have always loved Paula's imagination and her ability to make stunning art pieces utilizing her applique and embroidery skills. I had lunch with her a couple of months ago and took some pictures of quilts she had finished and works in progress. Another post.....